Welcome to the Center for Family Navigation and Community Health Promotion!
Our Center serves as a platform within our Pediatrics department to encourage family-centered interventions delivered by “family navigators,” a type of community health worker (CHW). Our goal is to establish a link between research and clinical practice to improve child and family outcomes in physical and mental health.
In 2015, the Center was established to standardize navigation services throughout the Pediatrics department. The goal of the Center is to prepare family navigators so to increase the quality of care for our families. The Center promotes community health through trainings and community collaborations. We work in different areas of the department, including clinical services, programmatic services and research.
Our mission is to translate evidence-based health promotion strategies – such as patient and family navigation, home visitation, the application of motivational interviewing to issues of treatment adherence, and mental health promotion – into routine practice at BMC. The Center prepares a lay, community health workforce to help families negotiate a complex healthcare landscape on behalf of their children.
This mission builds on Section 5313 of the Affordable Care Act to promote a robust community health workforce, and stems from our clinical experience at BMC concerning the barriers families encounter in obtaining treatment for their children, both in and out of the medical center. The Center trains and supervises a cadre of lay intervention providers to staff interventional research projects, innovative demonstration projects, and ambulatory clinics across the Department. Extramurally funded projects may also contract with the Center.
What is Family Navigation?
Family navigation is an adaptation of the evidence-based patient navigation model that incorporates a family systems approach. Children cannot be treated in isolation, and the family system should be incorporated in routine pediatric care. Family navigation is designed to fill this gap by helping families navigate medical, community, and government systems to improve family health. Ultimately, the goal of family navigation is to reduce health disparities for children in pediatric settings. Our family navigation model is embedded within the community health work framework, which targets health disparities by promoting wellness and reducing barriers to care within a culturally appropriate approach.
Why Use a Family Navigator?
Family navigators are part of clinical care teams and their scope of work includes:
- Proving a link to community-based resources
- Coordinating care for the entire family
- Screening and appropriate referrals to mental health
- Managing population health of their care team’s panel, including vaccination rates, wellness visits, follow-up on treatment plans
- Identifying barriers to appropriate care and creating action plans with families to improve access to care and treatment adherence
Family navigators are also trained to guide and motivate families during important periods of development for their children using motivational interviewing.
How is a Family Navigator Different From a Social Worker or Nurse?
Although family navigators may overlap in their scope of work with some social workers and nurses, navigators do not provide any clinical assessments or mental health treatments. Family navigators are the bridge between different sets of providers and systems.
Contact Us
If you are interested in using our family navigation model or would like consultation services, please contact Ivys.Fernandez-Pastrana@bmc.org.
Leadership
Megan Bair Merritt, MD, MSCE, Center Director
Dr. Bair Merritt is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine and Associate Division Chief in General Pediatrics at Boston Medical Center.
Ivys Fernandez-Pastrana, JD, Manager
In her role as lead family navigator at Boston Medical Center, Ivys assists families whose children have been diagnosed with autism by helping them “navigate systems” such as the health care and school systems and by connecting families to resources. Ivys has co-developed the family navigation model and supervises other family navigators in the Pediatrics department. Ivys holds a Juris Doctor and practiced family law before becoming a full-time navigator. Her long-term goals include developing accessible resources for Hispanic immigrants targeting health, education, and entitlements of individuals with disabilities.