Building a Multilingual Patient Navigation Team From Scratch

A newly opened international department in Chengdu recruited its first navigation team from hospitality and airline backgrounds, then added clinical terminology training over twelve weeks. Navigators accompany patients through registration, imaging and pharmacy, and hand over to clinical staff for consultations. Escalation rules keep non-clinical staff out of medical discussions. Within a year the team covered English, Russian, Japanese and Thai, with remote support for other languages.