FAMily Oriented Support (FAMOS): Psychosocial Intervention for Childhood Cancer Survivors and Their Families

FAMOS: The Effect of Psychosocial Intervention for Childhood Cancer Survivors and Their Families: A Randomized Controlled Trial

To investigate whether a home-based psychosocial family intervention that takes place shortly after ending the primary medical treatment can help families adjust to their cancer-related psychological issues.

The objective of this randomized controlled trial is to investigate whether home-based psychosocial interventions are able to help families of childhood cancer survivors cope with cancer-related psychological issues.

Method: 300 families will be recruited from the four pediatric oncology departments in Denmark where 150 families' will receive a home-based psychosocial intervention and 150 families will be in the control group. The study will take place shortly after the child completes the primary treatment. The primary outcome is post-traumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) in parents and secondary outcomes include among others quality of life, sick-leave, coping strategies and family functioning. Families in the intervention group will receive a 6 session manualized intervention based on a Cognitive Behavioral framework. Four sessions will focus on the parents and two sessions will focus on the child, who had cancer, and his/her siblings. The main goal of the sessions is to teach families how to adapt healthy psychological adjustments to pediatric oncology and prevent PTSS in family members. As a part of the intervention, families will be presented with video clips of other parents discussing how cancer has affected their family, to show common issues in experiencing having a child undergo cancer treatment. Every family member will be asked to complete a set of questionnaires to measure the outcome of the intervention at baseline before the intervention, 6 months follow-up and 12 months follow-up.

It is expected that families in the intervention group experience a larger improvement in their post-traumatic stress symptoms as well as strengthening the family function, quality of life and reducing sick leave compared to the control group.

Inclusion Criteria:

• Families of children in the age range of 0-17 years diagnosed with any kind of cancer and treated at one of the four pediatric oncology departments in Denmark are invited to participate in the project after ending primary medical treatment.

Exclusion Criteria:

• If the child has a severe co-morbidity
• If the child has a mental disorder at diagnosis
• If the child is declared terminal ill at the end of treatment (less than 6 months of survival).
• If the parents and the children do not speak Danish. The participants have to be able to read and answer the questionnaires at the least, to be included in the project.
• If the parents do not wish to hand in consent form
• If the family participates in another randomized psychosocial intervention project