Sept 2022

EU Navigate organised a symposium on navigation interventions at the 7th Public Health and Palliative Care International Conference

EU Navigate organised and facilitated a symposium titled “Navigation interventions to support patients with serious or advanced illness and their family: opportunities and challenges” at the 7th Public Health and Palliative Care International Conference in the beautiful city of Bruges, Belgium.

This symposium brought light to exciting insight on navigation interventions in palliative care and discusses our way forward. Together with experts from Canada, the Netherlands, Belgium and the United Kingdom, we presented: 1) the implementation and evaluation of an innovative public health palliative care intervention “Nav-CARE”, which is a volunteer-led navigation intervention for older people with advanced chronic illness and their family living at home in Canada; 2) the brief history of cancer navigation programs and the need for navigation in supportive, palliative and survivorship care in Europe; 3) the development of a logic model that underpins a navigation intervention for older people with cancer in Europe; and 4) the evaluation of navigation interventions as a supplementary palliative care support service and the need for appropriate outcome measures. Finally, we discussed opportunities and challenges for implementing navigation interventions in palliative care in different healthcare systems, as well as for evaluating navigation interventions in a palliative care context using different research designs.

Our awesome speakers were none other than the following professors:
1) Prof. Lieve Van den Block, the EU Navigate Project coordinator (Belgium);
2) Prof. Wendy Duggleby, one of the two developers of the original Nav-CARE programme, from which NavCare-EU will be based (Canada)
3) Prof. Bregje Onwuteaka-Philipsen, a Professor in end-of-life research and the principal investigator for the Dutch EU Navigate team (Netherlands)
4) Prof. Catherine Walshe, a Professor in palliative care in primary and community care and the Editor-in-Chief of Palliative Medicine (United Kingdom)

The high level of turn-out, enthusiasm and engagement of our audience made this symposium a very successful one. Many thanks to all our awesome speakers and to everyone who joined us in this symposium. We hope to see you in our next event!