Participants in the experimental group will receive the DST intervention, which comprises four workshops. Each workshop will last 2.5 hours and will be conducted by a qualified interventionist. In the workshops, a group of 6-8 participants will first share their personal cancer experiences and offer feedback to other participants in the context of a story circle. A set of guiding questions will be used to facilitate participants in telling their own stories. Particularly, probing will be used to guide the child participants to share their own experiences. Open-ended questions such as 'How do you think about your cancer experience?' will be asked. Subsequent supplementary questions, such as 'What makes you feel in this way?' and 'can you give me some examples' will be asked to encourage more sharing. Afterwards, participants wil be encouraged to write their own script and storyboard, record their stories using a microphone, and choose photos and videos to illustrate their stories.

No intervention will be carried out among participants in the control group. However, customary care including medical follow-up, medication prescription, and nursing interventions will be provided, as usual.

DST is an intervention that can potentially mitigate the psychological impact of traumatic experiences. People can usually find positive meaning in a traumatic experience by communicating their experience using narratives like storytelling. In particular, by externalising the traumatic experience in the form of a narrative, the individual can become an objective agent, distancing themselves from negative meanings attached to the experience. This lowers people's resistance to and defence against the experience, assisting them to explore alternative perspectives regarding the experience and to identify its positive aspects, which boost self-esteem. Likewise, storytelling engages different areas of the brain, including those responsible for visual, language, and hearing functions, to reorganise the disorganised traumatic experience into a coherent story, facilitating integration of the experience into existing memories.

The CES-DC will be used to assess the number of depressive symptoms among participants. This instrument contains 20 items evaluated on a 4-point scale, from 0 (not at all) to 3 (a lot). The possible range of scores is between 0 and 60, with higher scores indicating more depressive symptoms. The cut-off score is 15. Participants with scores higher than 15 are considered to be experiencing significant levels of depressive symptoms. This scale has been widely applied in studies among Hong Kong Chinese children with cancer, and its psychometric properties have been well-established in this population.

The RSES will be used to assess participants' self-esteem. This scale contains 10 items that are evaluated on a scale of 1 to 4. Higher scores indicate higher levels of self-esteem. This scale has been widely applied in paediatric oncology research and has been previously validated in Hong Kong Chinese children.