Nav-CARE – Navigating life and aging with chronic illness

Nav-CARE (Navigation – Connecting, Accessing, Resourcing, Engaging)

Navigating life and aging with chronic illness

The overall goal of the Nav-CARE program is to improve the quality of life of adults living at home with serious illness. Community organizations across Canada are project partners. View the Nav-CARE brochure.

This project builds upon five years of collaborative work with knowledge partners in which we developed the conceptual and theoretical foundations; created, tested, and refined curriculum for volunteer navigators; and conducted three incremental pilots to determine the feasibility and acceptability of the Nav-CARE model.

Why is Nav-CARE important?
Adults living at home with serious illness, particularly those who do not yet qualify for home-based nursing care, often live with unmet needs and heavy symptom burden resulting in poor quality of life. Many do not know the services that are available to assist them.  Our previous research (see below) has demonstrated the value of using trained navigators to visit in the home to provide psychosocial support, education, guidance on advance care planning and connection to community and health resources. These navigators engage older adults to identify the services and resources available and to connect them to those resources using a best-fit, client-centred approach.

To read more, click on: 
https://pesut-lab.sites.olt.ubc.ca/projects-2/ncare/

Interested in how your community organization can get involved? 
Contact us for more information! 

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATORS
Barb Pesut, PhD, RN
Canada Research Chair, Health, Ethics and Diversity
Associate Professor,
School of Nursing
University of British Columbia 
Ph. 250-807-9955 
barb.pesut@ubc.ca

Wendy Duggleby, PhD, RN, AOCN
Professor and Nursing Research Chair in Aging and Quality of Life University of Alberta, Faculty of Nursing 
Ph. 1-877-692-5909 
livingwithhope@nurs.ualberta.ca

Read our most recent document: Findings From a Knowledge Translation Study at  … -method evaluation of a volunteer navigation intervention for older persons living with chronic illness (Nav-CARE): findings from a knowledge translation study