How does a Patient Navigator help those with cancer with fertility preservation?

I work primarily with the Oncology Department at Northwestern which is part of the Robert H. Lurie comprehensive cancer center of Northwestern University.
Generally how I get a referral is an oncologist will page me, let me know that a patient is either there or coming in and that they would like to talk about fertility preservation. The oncologist then kind of gives me the low down about the patient, their diagnosis, their expected treatment, their diagnosis, the timeline of what the treatment is going to be and what time, if any, we have to do any type of fertility preservation treatment, which is really important.

The timeline is the most important part in all of this. It’s critical to really get that piece up front so we really know how much time we have. If it’s a breast cancer patient, for example, we may have several weeks. The patient is able to have surgery first, then have some sort of fertility preservation before going on to the other treatment they might need, if they need chemotherapy. If it’s a patient that is needing treatment right away, they only have a short window of time which may limit their options. It’s important to know that.

So, I work closely with the Oncology team that is working with this patient to let them know. I work very closely with Urology and Reproductive Endocrinology at Northwestern to link the patients up very quickly to those specialty areas to make their treatments available and get them completed as quickly as we can.