Washington State University Spokane

This study explores healthcare professionals' perspectives on how a Nurse Navigator (NN) role can be used to enhance pain management for adults with pain living in community settings.

A qualitative descriptive design was employed using virtual focus groups to gather data from healthcare professionals experienced in nurse navigation, care coordination, or case management.

A convenience sample of seven U.S.-based participants was recruited, all of whom reported current or prior experience working as or with NNs, care coordinators, or case managers. Participants held roles in pain and oncology-focused navigation across diverse geographic regions. Focus groups were conducted via videoconferencing, recorded, and analyzed using qualitative content analysis to identify common themes.

Four key themes emerged: Creative Problem Solving, Functional Roles of Care Navigation, Relational Roles of Care Navigation, and Emotional Support. These themes highlight the multifaceted ways NNs can support adults with pain through coordinating care, managing resources, fostering relationships, and providing empathetic support - key components of person-centered pain management.

The findings underscore the potential of NNs to improve pain management through personalized advocacy and care coordination. Integrating NNs into care teams may offer opportunities to enhance outcomes and address systemic barriers. Healthcare organizations should consider investing in formal training, role standardization, and supportive policies to develop NN roles and measure impacts on community-based pain management.

Sleep problems occur more frequently in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) than in typically developing individuals, and recent studies support a genetic link between ASD and sleep disturbances. However, it remains unclear how sleep problems may be mechanistically connected to ASD phenotypes. A longstanding hypothesis posits that an imbalance between excitatory and inhibitory (E/I) signaling in the brain underlies the behavioral characteristics of ASD. In recent years, emerging evidence has shown that regulation of the E/I ratio is coupled to sleep/wake states in wild-type animal models. In this review, we will explore the idea of altered E/I regulation over the sleep/wake cycle as a mechanism bridging sleep disruption and behavioral phenotypes in ASD.