Characterizing Interventions and Family Assistance of a Nurse Navigation Program in Orofacial Cleft Care.

Objective: Characterize the interventions and assistance employed by a cleft nurse navigator (CNN) which have mediated improvement in care equity at our institution.

Design: Retrospective study.

Setting: Academic tertiary care center.

Patients, participants: Patients presenting with cleft lip and/or cleft palate presenting between August 2020 and August 2021 with exclusions for syndromic diagnosis, Pierre-Robin sequence, late (> 6 months) presentation, and prior cleft surgery at outside institutions.

Interventions: Multidisciplinary cleft nurse navigator program.

Main outcome measure(s): Family interactions with the CNN by phone, text, and email across the first year of life including feeding support, nasoalveolar molding (NAM) assistance, appointment scheduling, financial assistance, addressing perioperative concerns, and facilitating physician consults. Patient weight and surgical timing were also recorded.

Results: Sixty-nine patients were included with a total of 639 interactions between the CNN and families. Scheduling support (30%), addressing perioperative concerns (22%), and feeding support (20%) were the most common interactions. Feeding support and NAM assistance were heavily distributed in the first 3 months of life compared to after 3 months (P < .001). Median age at first contact was 1 week (range: 22 weeks gestation-14 weeks). There was no difference in the proportion of families receiving feeding support, NAM assistance, or scheduling assistance based on insurance status or race (P > .05 for all).

Conclusions: Scheduling assistance, addressing perioperative concerns, and feeding support are the predominant methods by which the CNN interacts with and assists families of patients with cleft conditions. CNN service distribution is largely equitable between demographic groups.