Adolescent cancer survivors, like other adolescents, want to be involved in medical decision-making at the end of life. They value autonomous decision-making, without excluding parents from the process. The experience of living through a life-threatening illness can alter adolescents' attitudes toward requests for NTDs and APS.

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The results of our study show the complexity and diversity of the needs of boys and girls with disruptive behaviour in Flemish residential care institutes. Flemish government has to be aware of the fact that the current referral system selects the children with outspoken externalizing and problematic behaviour towards special health care and special schools. They are relegated because the mainstream system is not equipped well enough to cope with their disruptive, aggressive behaviour. Even if governments are in favour of inclusive education, it seems that in practice a rest group is created, in which girls are selected through the same mechanisms as boys, in this case for the same reasons of negative externalizing behaviour and social problems. For this it seems appropriate that school and (semi)-residential institutes apply a specific and adapted methodology.

The BIOMED II project, ‘Improving Psychiatric Treatment in Residential Programmes for Newly Dependent Groups through Relapse Prevention’, provided a large database of characteristics of men and women in European therapeutic communities (TCs). One of the aims of the project was to improve the treatment of ‘emerging dependency groups’ through better assessment. Although American TC research has shown that there are important differences between men and women that should be taken into account when organising treatment, the BIOMED project failed to report on gender differences. This article tries to fill this gap by presenting an overview of the gender differences in the TC clients and lists the characteristics of the participating European TCs. The two overviews are given for each country separately. Descriptive methods were used. The authors discuss whether the TC programme considers the differences between men and women and whether the ‘community as method’ approach is gender sensitive.

Attitudes towards ELD requests varied with case and participant characteristics and type of ELD. The studied adolescents have a clear wish to be informed about terminal prognosis. Physicians and caregivers should adequately involve adolescents in decision making and tailor prognosis-related information to their needs and level of competency.