A study from the GW Cancer Center last month found its cancer patient navigator training course improves participants’ confidence and ability to guide patients through cancer care.

The School of Medicine and Health Sciences launched the Oncology Patient Navigator Training course in 2015 to provide aspiring patient navigators — trained professionals who help patients overcome financial and logistical obstacles to accessing care and cancer treatment — a standardized, foundational introduction to patient navigation and equip learners with the basic knowledge and skills needed to address challenges such as insurance hurdles, transportation issues and care coordination across providers. The study found the course was successful in strengthening navigators’ abilities to support patients as they move through complex cancer treatment systems, where delays in access, fragmented communication between providers and logistical constraints can directly affect care outcomes.

The free, fully online, self-paced course is open to anyone interested in patient navigation and does not require enrollment in a degree program, making it accessible to learners from a wide range of professional and educational backgrounds. The course has trained over 13,000 patient navigators across 42 countries, and has been translated and adapted for use in three other languages — Spanish, Portuguese and American Sign Language — according to the study.

Researchers conducted a retrospective analysis of data collected from participants over a 10-year period, using pre- and post-course assessments across multiple cohorts to measure changes in knowledge and self-reported confidence in core patient navigation skills before and after completing the training, according to the study. 

Mandi Pratt-Chapman, the associate director of scientific communication and dissemination at the GW Cancer Center and the study’s author, said she designed the GW program to create a consistent foundation for aspiring navigators with widely varying backgrounds and training levels.

“We are the go-to training for many cancer centers onboarding patient navigators,” she said. “Our training has been adopted in multiple languages and the government of Brazil has used it for its social service sector.”

Pratt-Chapman said patient navigation in oncology as a whole emerged from efforts to address disparities in cancer outcomes, specifically differences in diagnosis stage and survival rates between patients of different races. She said a breast surgeon at Harlem Hospital Center in New York City first introduced the idea in 1990 after noticing that his Black patients were diagnosed at later stages and had higher mortality rates than his white patients.

Participants in the GW training course showed measurable gains in both knowledge and self-reported confidence after completing the course, suggesting that structured, standardized training can strengthen preparedness for real-world navigation work. The study also found learners from a wide range of personal and professional backgrounds were able to successfully engage with and apply the training content in their work as navigators, according to the study.

Pratt-Chapman said the GW course ultimately aims to improve equity in cancer care by training patient navigators to identify, address and help patients overcome logistical and structural barriers like transportation gaps, insurance coverage issues and difficulties coordinating care across multiple providers that can delay treatment.

“The premise of patient navigation is getting people to the place where they can benefit from the innovations that have happened,” she said. “We need the science to advance the medicine; navigation is trying to get more people to benefit.”

Pratt-Chapman said the program’s free and accessible format has been key to its widespread reception, especially compared to other in-person trainings that are often costly. She said the course is available online and is primarily used by cancer centers, health systems and public health programs that incorporate it into onboarding or workforce training for patient navigators.

“Our idea is to provide a free, accessible training so that anyone, anywhere could kind of access fundamental knowledge about something that’s helping people get to and through treatment,” she said. “It’s a position that may or may not be paid, and if paid, is likely not paid a lot, so it felt important to kind of reduce that barrier for the navigator.”

Nathaly Garces-Lenis, the lead bilingual patient navigator at the Georgetown University Ralph Lauren Center for Cancer Prevention and a participant in the course, said the training has been a key foundation for how she approaches her work with patients today. In her role, she said she helps patients with cancer screening and care by coordinating appointments, assisting with paperwork and translations and connecting them to community resources while addressing barriers like transportation, insurance and language access. 

She said she regularly draws on what she learned in the program in her day-to-day interactions with patients, especially when it comes to communication and patient support.

“I use everything that I learned in the course,” she said. “I use it most of the time like how to connect with patients.”

Garces-Lenis said she particularly appreciated the course because of its accessibility for trainees from diverse backgrounds, especially because it’s free and offers lessons in multiple languages, including her native Spanish. She also said that the course has gotten more popular within her own workplace, as she continues to recommend it to other navigators who join her team.

“I always recommend it to the new navigators that we have here, and they also have done it because of the recommendation,” she said.

Katie Fox, another patient navigator at the Georgetown Center for Cancer Prevention, said quality and formal training is essential to preparing navigators for the complexity of guiding patients through cancer screening and care systems, especially when working with uninsured and underinsured populations.

“Having that training is very beneficial, just to understand that, yes, we want to help people get as many screenings as they can,” she said. “But we also have to understand that there are a lot of cultural barriers.”

She said that while she had not previously encountered GW’s training program, she sees value in its accessibility and in expanding structured training opportunities for future navigators.

“Having a program that’s easy to access and hopefully recruit people in the community to become patient navigators is really great,” she said. “And it’d be a great opportunity to not only help individuals with getting jobs, but also help create a stronger and more trustful community.”