We have just announced several workshops, including Level 1s in metro Denver and Glenwood Springs, and advanced courses in Durango. These courses are FREE to patient navigators in Colorado!

Level 1 Workshops

Patient Navigator Fundamentals is our three-day training for patient navigators who want to gain navigation skills and knowledge of patient resources, basic health promotion, professional conduct and motivational interviewing. There is online prework required before attending this course.

Level 1 – Lakewood
When: April 25-27 (FULL – Waitlist available)

Level 1 – Glenwood Springs
When: May 3-5

Level 2 Workshops

Advanced Health Behavior Change – Aurora
Help your clients reach their goals! This course provides tools and strategies to help clients around diet, exercise, diabetes and cardiovascular disease prevention and control.
When: April 21

Advanced Health Literacy – Arvada
Learn communication strategies to increase your clients’ understanding of health information.
When: May 16

We are coming to Durango! Workshops will be held at Fort Lewis College

May 9: Advanced Care Coordination
May 10: Advanced Motivational Interviewing
May 11: Advanced Health Behavior Change

Are you a Patient Navigator Supervisor or Manager?
These Level 3 workshops are just for you!

Leading and Administering a Patient Navigation Program – Arvada
The course provides a basic understanding of the patient navigator (PN) intervention model, reviews challenges facing PN program managers and provides strategies for an effective PN program.
When: April 17

Using Evaluation for Program Improvement for Patient Navigation – Denver
This two-day Level 3 course offered by the Denver Prevention Training Center is designed to meet the needs of Patient Navigator Supervisors who want to increase basic evaluation skills.
When: April 27-28

Online Course: Emotional and Social Aspects of Disease 
Chronic diseases affect our physical bodies, but also have an emotional, social and psychological impact. This 7-week online course helps patient navigators understand their role and how to help patients and their caregivers deal with complex emotional issues related to chronic disease.
When: May 15-June 30
Where: All online/via Zoom web conference

We are pleased to announce that the Patient Navigator Training Collaborative, in partnership with Southwestern Colorado Area Health Education Center, is bringing 3 advanced patient navigator workshops to beautiful Durango, CO, in May 2017. Details and links to register are below. All workshops will be held at Fort Lewis College and are FREE to Colorado residents!

May 9: Advanced Care Coordination

Healthcare delivery is often fragmented, resulting in higher costs, poor health outcomes and decreased patient satisfaction. In this course, you will learn what patient groups will benefit most from care coordination and what these activities look like. You will leave will the knowledge and skills to provide high-quality, coordinated care for your clients.

May 10: Advanced Motivational Interviewing

This workshop builds on the MI concepts introduced in our Level 1 course. MI is designed to address a patient’s ambivalence to change. This is a great skill to have in your toolbox to reduce resistance, help your clients set goals and ultimately improve patient outcomes. Join us for this fun, interactive workshop!

May 11: Advanced Health Behavior Change

Help your clients reach their goals! This workshop provides a deeper dive into tools and strategies to help clients around diet, exercise, diabetes and cardiovascular disease prevention and control. There is a small amount of online prework required prior to the in-person course.

Please note that the perquisite to attend these workshops is Level 1: Patient Navigator Fundamentals or equivalent work experience. We are exploring the possibility of holding a Level 1 course in Durango in Fall 2017.

Questions? Contact Erin Martinez at 303-724-7764 or erin.martinez@ucdenver.edu.

Photo courtesy Bill Grimes/Fort Lewis College

Patient Navigators can practice with mock patients, receive one-on-one coaching 

The Patient Navigator Training Collaborative (PNTC) is offering a unique opportunity to help patient navigators improve their motivational interviewing (MI) skills. Participants in the “Motivational Interviewing Academy” this spring will receive three sessions to practice their skills with a mock patient and follow-up coaching.

“Motivational interviewing workshops are an excellent venue for learning a new way of ‘being’ with clients, but research clearly shows that workshops alone do not change practice,” said Kathie Garrett, PNTC MI Instructor. “To successfully integrate MI spirit and skills into your daily practice, you need guidance in the form of coding and coaching.”

The MI Academy will provide patient navigators  the unique opportunity to receive real time practice with mock patients, objective MI integrity coding feedback and one-on-one coaching.

“People pay hundreds of dollars for this type of training, but we are offering three practice and coaching sessions free of charge,” Garrett said.

Motivational Interviewing is an evidence-based approach to help people make decisions, from quitting smoking to dietary changes to managing a chronic disease. MI is designed to address a patient’s ambivalence to change. This is a great skill to have in your toolbox to help improve patient outcomes.

By enrolling in this exciting opportunity, you will:

• Participate in three encounters with mock patients so you can practice using MI
• Have each session recorded and coded by an expert for various MI skills, to identify areas of strength and improvement
• Receive three one-on-one coaching sessions with a professional MI coach, offering personal feedback

Target Audience: Non-licensed (lay) health professionals/patient navigators working in Colorado. Because we want to offer this experience to a variety of agencies around the state, only 3 navigators from each agency will be accepted. In addition, this opportunity is only open to lay navigators (non nurses). Please see this link for resources on MI training for nurses from the CU School of Nursing.

The mock patient encounters will be scheduled in spring/early summer 2017. You will be able to schedule each 20-minute mock session and follow up coaching call at a time slot that works with your schedule. These sessions will be all done over the phone, so travel is not required.

Prerequisites: 

• Required: Level 1: Patient Navigator Fundamentals and Level 2: Advanced Motivational Interviewing
• Recommended prequisite: Advanced Health Behavior Change
• Been working as a patient navigator, health educator, community health worker or similar for at least 6 months
• Reside in Colorado
• Permission from your supervisor to participate
• Be a lay (non licensed) health professional

Questions? Email PNTC program manager Erin Martinez at erin.martinez@ucdenver.edu.

This online course helps patient navigators understand their role and how to help patients and caregivers deal with complex emotional issues related to chronic disease.

Course runs for 7 weeks, Feb. 13 to April 4, 2017 and will be facilitated by Kathleen Garrett.

Course Format: This is an online course. This course is led by an instructor, not self-paced.  ALL course activities take place via the Internet. There will be three live sessions during the course conducted via Zoom web conferencing. It is preferred if you have a web cam, but not required.

You will login to a course website to complete activities. Course activities include readings, online tutorials, videos, quizzes and online discussions. Activities are required each week. You will complete all activities independently and use the discussion tool to interact with other students 2-3 times per week.

Live sessions via Zoom:

– Tuesday, Feb 14: Noon-1 pm: Course Overview, Meet your Classmates
– Tuesday, March 7: Noon-1 pm: Live Discussion (topics to be announced)
– Tuesday, April 4: Noon-1 pm: Course Wrap Up, Q&A

We are working hard on our workshop calendar for 2017! Here’s a preview of what’s to come:

Level 1: Patient Navigator Fundamentals
January: Denver
March: Fort Collins
May: Glenwood Springs

We are planning to offer advanced courses in the central and north Denver metro areas, as well as the western slope.

Do you live in the Durango area? Take this brief survey and let us know what courses we should bring to you!

Bridging Theory and Practice will be held in March in Arvada.

ECHO Learning Sessions will be held in Care Coordination and Motivational Interviewing. There will also be opportunities for PNs to receive one-on-one Motivational Interviewing coaching. More details to come!

Please see below link to register. We hope you can join us!

Dates for 2017 Level 1 workshops will be announced soon. Locations include Fort Collins, Glenwood Springs and Metro Denver.

Level 1: Patient Navigator Fundamentals 
Our most popular course! Patient Navigator Fundamentals is a three-day in-person course with an online course component designed to improve your patient navigation skills.
Date/Time: Oct. 18-20
Location: Colorado Springs, CO
Register here 

Level 1 in Spanish
Our Level 1 curriculum delivered in Spanish. Location details and registration coming soon!
Date: September
Location: Denver, CO

Level 2: Advanced Care Coordination
Coordinated care contributes to patient-centered, high-quality care. This Level 2 course prepares patient navigators to coordinate care for their clients consistent with Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and Patient Centered Medical Home (PCMH) guidelines and requirements.
Date: Sept 20
Location: Fort Collins, CO
Register here

Level 2: Facilitation Skills for Patient Navigators
Are you a patient navigator looking to enhance your group education sessions or improve collaboration with your co-workers? Or maybe you’re a PN manager seeking to learn more about group dynamics and the individual needs of your employees. Whether you facilitate group-level interventions, staff meetings, or other group activities, this training is for you. All experience levels welcome.
Dates: Oct. 11 and 12
Location: Arvada, CO
Register here 

Level 3: Leading and Administering a Patient Navigation Program
This course is designed for supervisors of navigators, program planners and administrators of patient navigator programs.
Date/Time: Sept. 29
Location: Colorado Springs, CO
Register here

Social Determinants and Health Equity: Widening The Lens Of Health Promotion
This two-day course will examine the effects of social determinants of health such as economic status, stigma, homophobia, racism and other social and political issues on risk, prevalence and access to services.
Dates: Nov. 2-3
Location: Denver, CO
Register here

Save the Date – Registration coming soon for the below courses! Be sure to “Like” us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter to be the first to know!

• Advanced Motivational Interviewing in Alamosa, CO in September
• Level 1 in Denver, CO Nov 9-11
• Advanced Health Behavior Change in Colorado Springs Nov 10
• Level 3 Patient Navigator Supervisor in Denver, CO Nov. 15

Please contact us at admin@patientnavigatortraining.org regarding your organization’s training needs!

Level 1: Patient Navigator Fundamentals
Date/Time: Aug. 8, 9, & 10, 8:30 am – 5 pm
Location: Red Rocks Community College – Lakewood Campus, 13300 W 6th Ave., Room EA 1013, Lakewood, CO 80228
MAP

Click here to register.

The meeting was held to re-launch the Alliance (formerly called the Collaborative, but a separate organization than the Patient Navigator Training Collaborative) and convene the CHW, PN and PdS community to share opportunities to advance and sustain initiatives in Colorado.

Updates included:

Patient Navigator Training Collaborative: The PNTC has been offering trainings throughout the state since 2006. The training program has grown each year and trains hundreds of people per year in both basic skills and advanced curriculum.

“We do focus on the role of navigation – even if it’s not done by a patient navigator. So we try to make sure our content is relevant whether you’re called a community health worker, care coordinator, case manager… which is kind of a shift than previously,” said Patricia Valverde, PNTC director.

Otero Junior College: Located in La Junta, CO, Otero offers a 1-year Community Health Worker Certificate. This counts toward a Health Navigator Associate’s degree, and the college is working with four-year partners to articulate this into an bachelors’ degree.

“We have been very successful in reaching those underserved populations as our students. We are very excited about the number of first generation student who are coming to our classes,” said Kaysie Schmidt, OJC Health Navigation faculty member. The program plans to launch a distance learning option in the fall to expand reach outside the region.

Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s Workforce Initiative: This effort is to establish a competency-based credentialing program and registry for the state’s rapidly growing patient navigator workforce.

There are countless titles given to people performing navigation activities, but “They are really known for their ability to facilitate access to care, improvements in the quality of care and cultural competence in that care,” said Pat Uris, senior consultant for CDPHE’s Prevention Services Division.

The initiative aims to define the competencies and standardize the training for these unlicensed personnel to add a layer of protection for patients and employers, Uris said. Both the credentialed training program and the patient navigator registry will be voluntary. Initiative members envision that a navigator will learn a standard set of basic skills and pass a competency test, which will earn them a place on the registry.

Health Care Policy and Finance: Rocky Mountain Health Plans shared activities from the Regional Care Collaborative efforts, such as project on the Western Slope using navigators to work with clients one-on-one with the goal of reducing ER utilization rates.

In addition, the Colorado Regional Health Connectors program gave an update on their efforts. Regional Health Connectors  or RHCs are dedicated to improving the coordination of local services to advance health. The work of each RHC will be driven by the unique needs of their region. The common goal of the RHC program is to identify and address gaps in a comprehensive environment of care by enabling primary care practices to address all the determinants of health and by removing common obstacles between doctor’s recommendations and a patient’s daily life.

After the updates from the various organizations involved in PN work, participants met in small groups and gave feedback on the proposed Alliance Mission and Charter document.

The Alliance was formed in 2012 as a grassroots organization in an effort to align all of the various patient navigator/community health worker/promotoras groups in Colorado and identify and develop a sustainable model for this important work. The statewide coalition is composed of local and state agencies, advocacy groups, philanthropic organizations and public and private health plan representatives.

Up Next

• If you participated in the meeting and would like to share your thoughts, click here for a post-meeting survey.
• The next all-member CHW PN and PdS Alliance meeting date will be announced by early August. The group plans to meet quarterly.
• If you are interested in joining in the CHW Competencies Workgroup, this meeting will be held on August 8, 2016, from 1-2:30 pm via Zoom Connection (this webconnection modality has option for phone and computer). Email Andi Dwyer if you would like to join at Andrea.Dwyer@ucdenver.edu.

Level 1: Patient Navigator Fundamentals –
3 upcoming sessions

Topics in this comprehensive “Level 1” training include patient communication, health promotion, professional conduct and motivational interviewing.

April 11-13: Castle Rock
May 10-12: Denver
May 25-27: Glenwood Springs

Level 2 courses

Advanced Health Behavior Change – Aurora, CO
This course focuses on behavior change around chronic disease, including diabetes and cardiovascular disease prevention and control.
April 15
June 3

Advanced Care Coordination – Denver, CO
Coordinated care contributes to patient-centered, high-quality care. This Level 2 course prepares patient navigators to coordinate care for their clients.
April 22

 
Advanced Motivational Interviewing for Patient Navigators – Aurora, CO
In this course you will expand your skills related to the strategic use of questions and reflections to build upon and deepen client change talk.
May 13 

Join the Colorado Health Literacy Coalition in an interactive webinar from noon-1 p.m. Feb. 10  to learn more about health insurance literacy, including:

• The Colorado Consumer Health Initiative and current health insurance literacy resources
• Experimenting with ways to explain health insurance terms
• Empowering patients to get the most out of their plans

Speaker:

Adam Fox, Director of Strategic Engagement, Colorado Consumer Health Initiative (CCHI). Adam has worked with the (CCHI) for the past 4.5 years, overseeing all communications, media, website, and engagement strategies to ensure CCHI’s policy and education goals are achieved. Adam enjoys creating and implementing new, creative initiatives and taking opportunities to amplify the strength of CCHI’s membership coalition. He is best known for creating the viral “Got Insurance?” social media campaign to raise awareness about ACA enrollment in 2013.

This webinar is available free of charge but advanced registration is required.

Register at   https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/4427617147829093378

Source: Colorado Health Literacy Coalition 

Level 1

In February, Level 1, Patient Navigator Fundamentals, will be offered in both Pueblo and Denver.  In March, we’ll take Level 1 north to Fort Collins. In the spring, Level 1’s will be offered in Colorado Springs, on the Western Slope and in metro Denver. Dates and exact locations are TBD – stay tuned!

Level 2

Advanced Health Behavior Change will be offered in in February and April (the January course is already full!). This course focuses on chronic disease prevention and control. Advanced Care Coordination, which prepares navigators to offer high quality, patient-centered care, will be offered Feb. 18.

Online

For those looking for an online course, the next installment of Emotional and Social Aspects of Disease (a Level 2 course) kicks off on May 8. This is an instructor-led course with weekly required participation. More info here.

You can enrich your knowledge at any time with our free, self-paced eLearning courses. Topics include preventive healthcare, introduction to chronic disease, and clinical trials and patient navigation.

We are constantly adding new training opportunities. Our News, Facebook and Twitter pages are a great way to stay updated when courses are added.  The Events Calendar lists our most current schedule. If a course is not listed, a date has not been set and we will not be able to answer questions about upcoming course dates.

Grant enable program to continue to offer free workshops to Colorado Patient Navigators over the next three years

A 41-year-old patient came to the physical therapy office saying he just wanted his knee pain gone. The Mexican national had been out of work for nearly 12 months and was worried he would get evicted if he could not return to his job in interior design.

The patient became upset when the PT office had the wrong information. Someone in the office called Veronica Morales, a patient health navigator and the care coordination team lead at Mountain Family Health Centers in Glenwood Springs. Thus began a relationship that was equal parts coach and advocate.

Morales helped the patient get physical therapy and also treatment for his underlying problem: HIV. Several weeks later, when the patient was hospitalized for complications from HIV, another mix-up had him being discharged to his home, instead of to a nursing home as was specified by his physician. Morales stepped in to clear up the miscommunication, possibly saving his life.

“Patient navigators knit together a fragmented health care system,” says Patricia Valverde, MPH, PhD, an instructor in the Community and Behavioral Health department at the Colorado School of Public Health (ColoradoSPH) and director of the Colorado Patient Navigator Training Collaborative, which includes ColoradoSPH’s Center for Public Health Practice, the Denver Health Prevention Training Center, and Red Rocks Community College. The Collaborative is one of only two training programs in the country that specialize in patient navigation.

Valverde, a founding member of the Collaborative, ​has been training patient navigators for nearly a decade. She will continue to do so thanks to a new three-year, $1.5 million Cancer Cardiovascular and Pulmonary Disease grant from Colorado’s tobacco revenue fund.

The grant will enable the Collaborative to continue training navigators like Morales. Trainees include new and experienced navigators, social workers, nurses and community healthcare workers. Over the course of the previous three-year grant, nearly 1,300 trainees attended the Collaborative’s workshops.

Colorado residents can take workshops free of charge, while a small fee applies to out-of-state participants.

Everyday Words provides:

• Substitute terms
• Real-life examples of complex public health language
• Revised wording
• Tips to reinforce meaning and avoid other common pitfalls

Everyday Words is a result of years of CDC communication experience, formative research, and testing with diverse audiences.

Visit CDC’s health literacy website for more information about Everyday Words, training, and other health literacy resources you can use.

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Advanced Health Behavior Change – Jan. 29 in Aurora, CO

This course focuses on chronic disease, including diabetes and cardiovascular disease prevention and control. It is hybrid course which includes an online component and a one day skills practice workshop designed for patient navigators, care coordinators, clinical and non-clinical practice staff.

You must register for both the online and in-person components.

Recommended Prerequisite: Level 1 Patient Navigator Fundamentals Course (or see course instructor)

Additional Recommended Prerequisite: Advanced motivational interviewing (MI) or a total of 12 hours of MI training (or see course instructor)

Interested in learning basic patient navigation skills before 2015 draws to a close? Due to high demand, a Level 1: Patient Navigator Fundamentals course has been added in December. This course will be held from Dec. 7-9 at the CU South Denver Campus, 10035 Peoria St., Parker, CO, 80134.

Patient Navigator Fundamentals is a three-day in-person course with an online course component designed to improve your patient navigation skills. Topics in this comprehensive “Level 1” training include patient communication, health promotion, professional conduct and motivational interviewing.

Space is limited, so sign up today!

Register for Patient Navigator Fundamentals 

Improve your Patient Navigation skills with one of these workshops – just added! Sign up soon as space is limited.

Advanced Health Behavior Change – Dec. 11 in Aurora, CO

This course focuses on chronic disease, including diabetes and cardiovascular disease prevention and control. It is hybrid course which includes an online component and a one day skills practice workshop designed for patient navigators, care coordinators, clinical and non-clinical practice staff.

You must register for both the online and in-person components.

Recommended Prerequisite: Level 1 Patient Navigator Fundamentals Course (or see course instructor)

Additional Recommended Prerequisite: Advanced motivational interviewing (MI) or a total of 12 hours of MI training (or see course instructor)

Using Evaluation for Program Improvement and Capacity Building for Patient Navigation – Jan 13-14 in Arvada, CO

This two-day course offered by the Denver Prevention Training Center is designed to meet the needs of Patient Navigator Supervisors who want to increase basic evaluation skills. Participants will learn to use evaluation to improve prevention interventions; define common evaluation terms; use logic models to describe interventions; develop and prioritize evaluation questions; identify steps to prepare for evaluation; and identify strategies for building evaluation capacity within their organization.

Have you been keeping up with the news on PN ECHO Learning Communities?! They are going well. We’re in the midst of a Learning Community on Resources and will start a new one next month on Care Coordination.

We would like your input on upcoming PN ECHO Learning Community topics. Please take a few minutes to fill out the survey below:

PN ECHO Learning Communities Survey

What is a PN ECHO Learning Community?

• A group of 15-20 participants who convene regularly to increase knowledge and skills in regards to a specific topic
• Uses bi-directional video–all you need is an internet connection and computer/phone/laptop/phone with a camera and microphone to participate
• Involves topic experts who briefly present on current best practices and strategies, and participants who present cases on the use of those practices and strategies
• Is highly interactive with sharing of information using a case-based, peer to peer learning structure

The current PNTC ECHO Learning Community, facilitated by Andrea Dwyer, convenes monthly and has focused on Resources for Patient Navigators.  Using bi-directional video, topic experts have provided brief presentations on best practice strategies, followed by group case discussion.

What are participants saying?

Since I have only launched my position 2/1/2015, I am continuing to grow it and this course has thus far proved invaluable.

The topics for this session – and those planned through Sept. could not have come at a better time for me/my organization. I can’t believe how much I learn in an hr – without leaving my desk! Thank you

Stay tuned for information on upcoming PNTC ECHO Learning Communities.  Also, a big thank you to Kory Thomas and Christine Cook from the Colorado School of Public Health for your collaboration and support on this!

The Advanced Health Behavior Change Workshop was so much fun last week! Thank you to everyone who came and participated.

Please bear with us as we transition into the new grant year.  We will be updating the course calendar shortly. Rest assured we’ve got a full schedule of workshops ahead!