Key responsibilities include effective communication with patients and their families, managing inquiries, and providing non-clinical guidance regarding appointments and care. The Cancer Navigator also monitors email correspondence, produces accurate documentation, and acts as a liaison for healthcare stakeholders to ensure timely responses and coordination within the department. This position is vital in helping the NHS meet performance targets related to cancer care, enhance patient outcomes, and contribute to the overall efficiency of cancer pathway management.
The Administration Coordinator will actively manage the administrative processes attached to patient pathways, ensuring a smooth and efficient service for both the multidisciplinary team and patients, in order to deliver a high quality administration service, a positive patient experience, and excellent customer service.
To streamline the coordination of cancer-related imaging services, improve patient pathway management, and enhance communication between multidisciplinary teams.
1. Improving Cancer Pathway Timeliness
Lever: A Cancer Navigator can streamline the diagnostic and treatment pathway by ensuring timely scheduling of scans, reporting, and follow-ups for cancer patients.
Strategic Impact: This leads to faster diagnosis and treatment initiation, helping meet NHS cancer performance targets like the 62-day cancer waiting time standard and reducing patient anxiety.
2. Reducing Diagnostic Delays and DNAs
Lever: The Cancer Navigator helps reduce the number of missed appointments (DNAs) by coordinating bookings, ensuring patient attendance, and rescheduling as needed.
Strategic Impact: Minimising delays and DNAs helps meet key cancer performance indicators and ensures patients are on track for timely diagnosis and treatment.
3. Optimising Use of Outsourcing and CDCs
Lever: A Cancer Navigator can coordinate outsourcing to Community Diagnostic Centres (CDCs) and external teleradiology services, ensuring quality control and timely report turnaround.
Strategic Impact: This reduces diagnostic bottlenecks and ensures that outsourcing supports, rather than hinders, cancer pathway efficiency.
- Supporting Multidisciplinary Teams (MDTs)
Lever: The Cancer Navigator facilitates communication between radiology and MDTs by ensuring accurate and timely reporting of imaging results.
Strategic Impact: Streamlined MDT processes improve decision-making and treatment planning, directly enhancing patient outcomes.
About us
- Communicate clearly, effectively and appropriately with the multidisciplinary team, patients and their family, visitors or carers, and other clinicians involved in the care of the patient, e.g. General Practitioners.
- Manage and answer telephone calls related to the service in a courteous and prompt manner.
- Provide patients with information about appointments or non-clinical advice and guidance regarding their care.
- Resolve complex queries, using analysis, experience and judgement to determine when to pass the caller on to a member of the clinical team, or when to escalate the call to a senior colleague. Where calls are passed on, ensure that the caller is reassured regarding expected response times and has further contact details if necessary.
- Act as a point of contact for the department or specialty, dealing with queries from stakeholders and passing on relevant information to appropriate team members or departments as required.
- Receive and respond to e-mail queries, monitoring, managing and triaging email correspondence to generic inboxes.
- Using hospital information systems, produce accurate correspondence for patients, GPs and others involved in care, and ensure its timely dissemination to stakeholders.
After several years of ever closer working, North Mid and Royal Free London are planning to come together as one organisation to enable them to go further and faster in improving services for patients and the health of the local community than they can achieve separately. The merger of North Mid into the RFL group is currently expected to take place on 1 January 2025, subject to NHS England and Secretary of State approval.
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