Student Navigators serve approximately 400 patients annually.
Through a partnership between CPP and UW Health students work with clients to help them connect with needed community resources and follow-up with them regularly to help them stay healthy.
Providers and staff at UW Health primary care clinics, including Wingra Family Medical Center and Northport Family Medical Center, ask their patients if they would like assistance meeting basic needs that impact health such as:
- transportation
- food
- jobs/job training
- childcare
Clients who want to work with a student resource navigator are referred to our program. Students also provide services at a MEDiC free health clinic.
Students learn about the important links between basic needs and health, interact directly with clients to help them meet their needs, and learn important client advocacy skills. Law and pre-law students are on hand to help clients with health-harming legal needs. Clients receive guidance as they navigate the web of social service and legal systems.
As one patient described it: “Well, it makes me feel like someone cares. That I have support. It helps me, it motivates me to thrive and do better for me and my daughter with the help that I’m provided.”
Client referrals to the Resource Navigator Program happen from community-based clinics. There is no direct application process for clients.
If you are a student looking for more information on how to become a part of this program, please check out our Undergraduate Opportunities.
Questions? Reach out to Coordinator Ashleigh Ross, Ashleigh.Ross@wisc.edu, 608-263-2432
Testimonials
“The navigator was the only consistent person to follow up with me and my son over the past three months. It means so much to me.”
Client, UW Health Northport Family Medicine Clinic
“Since joining the navigator program, I’ve begun to realize the importance of being empathetic when it comes to working with patients. There are things that medications can’t solve, like food and housing insecurity, which need to be a major concern for healthcare professionals. Our job shouldn’t just be to prescribe medication, it should be to really get to know the patient.”
Steven Do, UW-Madison pharmacy student
“We ask patients if they would like us to stop contacting them, but most patients want us to continue. Lower-income people often face significant financial stress, so we default to contacting them again. And sometimes it’s just as another crisis hits. We already have that relationship established.”
Lane Hanson, former Resource Navigator Program Coordinator