The diagnosis of cancer forces entire families to earn how to cope. This is especially true when the patient is the parent of young children. Past interventions for families dealing with parental cancer have focused on the intermediate and late stages of illness and treatment, including bereavement. There are no programs with demonstrated effectiveness available to families which focus on the parents and child needs in the period immediately following diagnosis. This application proposes development of a video intervention designed to help families make healthier adjustments and increase their resiliency when a parent has cancer. The program consists of three videos (parent tape, child tape, adolescent tape) and a comprehensive guidebook. The program will be designed to alleviate acute stress, facilitate adaptive coping and reduce the negative psychological and emotional effects of newly diagnosed parental cancer on children. The program will offer specific help to parents about how to communicate with their children and how to understand children's developmental needs. Phase addressed development of the structure and content of the program. Phase II will produce a beta version of the program and includes a clinical trial to test the efficacy and safety of the program.
The We Can Cope program will join a succession of other multimedia programs focused on medical and behavioral health issues being developed by ITS. We expect this product to have tremendous appeal to consumers and providers of oncology-related services, including doctors, nurses, psychologists and social workers. We believe there is be an extensive market for a product of this nature. ITS is working very closely on this and other projects with Intelihealth. Intelihealth is a large, rapidly growing healthcare information company. Through Intelihealth-related outlets on the Internet and through national television networks with which they work, we will be able to achieve wide publicity for the We Can Cope program.
