10 new Indigenous patient navigators will help build trust, Horizon manager says

Horizon Health Network is hiring 10 new Indigenous patient navigators, bringing the network's total to 12.

The network has seen the benefits of having people in this role since Indigenous patient navigators were hired for Fredericton and Miramichi hospitals in 2022, said Aaron Hatty, Horizon's regional manager of Indigenous health programming.

"We have seen many positive outcomes from those relationships — seeing how patients feel supported, patients feel heard, less afraid," she said Tuesday.

Hatty said the needs of Indigenous people and how they access the health care system might not be familiar to health care providers. This navigation is one part of an Indigenous navigator's role, she said.

Another part is "discharge planning," she said, and involves knowing whom to call for community health nurses and mental wellness programming.

The person in the navigator's role also makes sure patients have access to culturally safe care, including access to sacred medicines and smudging. Patients could get help filing official complaints as well, if necessary.

Hatty, from Sitansisk, or St. Mary's First Nation, said she graduated 20 years ago and started out as a nurse in a small First Nations community. 

Being fresh out of university at the time and having worked in hospitals, she noticed a huge difference, especially in how Indigenous patients were treated when it came to discharge planning and transitions in care.

Hatty said systemic racism is still real within health care as a whole.

"Systemic racism does not necessarily, you know, translate into somebody intentionally deciding to be mean to somebody because of their different race," she said.

"It even involves not having an understanding of these different complex systems or how, you know, things might be functioning for this particular person based on them being Indigenous or from an Indigenous community."

Two of the new Indigenous patient navigators will be assigned to the Moncton Hospital and the Saint John Regional Hospital, while the remaining eight will be divided among the addiction and mental health and primary care teams.

Hatty said one of the biggest challenges that Indigenous people might face in the health care system is about trust.

She thinks these additional patient navigators will help with that.

"We're not that far away from the residential school system, we're not that far away from Indian hospital systems, we're not that far away from expecting to be treated poorly automatically," Hatty said. 

"Knowing that you have that trusted person, or you have somebody that even looks like you, or you know somebody is going to understand you, can make a huge difference in terms of when you decide to access care [and] whether or not you stay and receive services."