Who can enter
- Children (8-18 years) with (advanced) cancer
- Parents of children (0-18 years) with (advanced) cancer
- Parents who have lost their child to cancer in the past 5 years
- Healthcare professionals from the Princess Máxima Center and primary care (home care, general practitioners)
Goal
The aim of this study is to develop an app in which children with cancer and/or their parents can register symptoms at home. A symptom is a characteristic or complaint that may arise from the disease or treatment. Examples are: nausea, pain, or anxiety.
With the symptom-app, children with cancer and/or their parents can easily contact the involved healthcare professionals. The healthcare professional can then find a solution together with the child and/or parents to reduce the symptoms.
Background
Unfortunately, children with cancer experience unpleasant symptoms. According to parents, these symptoms are sometimes inadequately treated. A reason for this is that healthcare professionals are not always informed about the severity of the symptoms. Currently, we are missing a tool to identify the symptoms children experience at home.
A symptom app that is used by the child/parents at home can help to inform the healthcare professionals about the symptoms a child is suffering from. This allows better and faster symptom treatment.
What will we do?
We will conduct interviews with children with cancer and/or their parents, and we will conduct a focus group with parents who lost their child to cancer. By doing this, we want to learn which symptoms are most important to children and parents and what might help reduce symptoms at home.
In creative design sessions with children, parents, healthcare professionals and app designers we are going to develop prototypes (trial versions of the app). This process is called co-design. The prototypes of the app will be tested and continuously improved in several rounds. This will ultimately lead to the final symptom app.
In a follow-up study the final symptom app will be tested.