Paid survivor peer-navigators as a recognised health workforce role
Train and pay people who have been through cancer to guide newly diagnosed patients through the system, especially where oncologists and nurses are scarce.
Community health workers transformed HIV and maternal care delivery in low-resource settings. Cancer has peer support but rarely a paid, trained, supervised navigator role. The proposal is a certified curriculum (system navigation, plain explanation of treatment, side-effect triage, financial and legal signposting, misinformation response), a salaried role in cancer units and community clinics, and a supervision structure under nursing.
- Patients lack understanding, navigation and agency · Most patients cannot understand their options, find trials, or push back, so decisions are made for them.
- Not enough oncologists, nurses, pathologists, physicists · The number of people with cancer is rising faster than the workforce trained to treat them.
- Most of the world has almost no cancer care · Seven in ten cancer deaths happen in low- and middle-income countries, where radiotherapy, pathology, surgery and drugs are scarce.
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