There’s a certain irony that Shannon Breckon’s job title is a Nurse Navigator when she travels more than 120km each day on the Bruce Highway to get to and from work at Bowen Hospital.
Her commitment to making a difference in rural patient’s lives and helping the chronically ill navigate the health system was recognised recently when she was presented with a Clinical Excellence Award (Rural) on International Nurses Day (May 10).
Shannon describes her nurse navigator role as “complex care co-ordination for people with complex and chronic health issues”. Her broad clinical skills help to identify and monitor the health care requirements of disadvantaged or high needs patients in rural areas, breaking down the barriers to accessing timely services and specialist care.
“What I love about the navigator model of care is that we are trained to look at the whole person and we can be a strong advocate for improving their quality of life,” she said.
“This translates to reducing the amount of time spent away from home attending appointments, improving the communication between the patient and their care providers, sitting with them for specialist telehealth appointments to support their health literacy and build their confidence to voice their concerns.”
Shannon said her skillset was rural generalist so great clinical assessment skills, advanced systems knowledge, problem solving skills and good networking and communication skills were vital.
“A lot of patients have more than one chronic condition and their care is complex because of this and psychosocial and socio-economic factors,” Shannon said.
“I help them navigate what services are available in the community and regularly communicate with their GP to ensure the appropriate referrals are made, so that they can access them,” she said.
Born and raised in Clermont, Shannon said she is very conscious of the challenge of geographic isolation on people’s health outcomes.
“People in rural areas are isolated from specialist medical care and follow up care is often problematic. Rural communities often have limited access to GPs and the hospitals are very busy places and often not ideal environments for little people, dementia patients or the immune compromised in particular,” she said.
Remote communities like Collinsville were extra challenging – sometimes patients needed multiple specialist appointments, so nurse navigators did their best to try and assist with travel and to arrange and line up appropriate appointments all in one trip.
Shannon said she always knew she wanted to work in healthcare. She studied at QUT and did her graduate year at Royal Brisbane which was “quite nostalgic as mum actually did her RN training there and I grew up listening to her nursing stories.”
In her 14-year career, Shannon has worked at Nambour and Roma and at Clermont hospital for two years before accepting the position in Bowen in 2018. She met her partner in Proserpine and now has two small children. She travels to work in Bowen four days a week from her home at Strathdickie.
Shannon said she was very flattered to have been nominated for the nursing award by her colleagues and for being credited as being a role model in nursing.
“I really love the camaraderie of the Bowen team and the model of care at the hospital which can be tailored to individual patients at their home if need be,” she said.
“The really rewarding part for me is improving self-management for rural patients and helping them understand their own conditions so they can make better choices for themselves and manage their overall health a lot better. I also recognise that there is a lot of pressure on the health system and it is constantly changing and evolving. Sometimes, despite the patient’s best efforts, they need an extra hand or an advocate to help them access care,” she said.
“It’s really lovely to be recognised by my colleagues, but I couldn’t do this job without the support from the wonderful teams at Bowen and Collinsville Hospital. Teamwork really does make the dream work.”
