The Life Experience of Family As Caregiver in Child with Cancer

Abstract

Background: Cancer in children is a very complex issue when treatment and care involve families especially parents, peers and other environmental components are needed to help the healing process. Purpose: This study aimed to know the experience of family while caring the children with cancer. Method: This study was a qualitative study with descriptive phenomenology design. The participants in this study were five people using Colaizzi's analysis technique. Results: The results of this study showed four themes, which were the physiological needs and the need for comfort and safety, loss process experienced by the caregiver, overcoming obstacles, and family's decision making. Conclusion: Physiological needs that came out from this study were bathing, eating, hyperthermia management, and giving the drug, while the need for comfort and safety described as bringing a child to a health care facility. The loss process starts with denial from family into acceptance phase. The family has strong confidence to overcome the obstacles with believing that the child will be cured. Environmental support with good health care facility and decision-making by the mother also showed in this study. Suggestions: The family who also being a caregiver for their children expected to increase their knowledge about cancer and health care provider are required to be capable enough to delivered health education aboutcancer.

Family Life Experiences in Caring for Children with Leukemia: A Literature Review

“…The studies were all conducted on parents who were taking care of children with leukemia, according to an analysis of ten articles that fit the criteria (Cornelio et al, 2016;Lambert et al, 2021;Pannier et al, 2019;Peikert et al, 2020;Pishkuhi et al, 2018;Raber et al, 2020;Shattnawi et al, 2021;Supriatin & Oktaviani, 2019;Van Schoors, De Paepe, et al, 2019;Verberne et al, 2019).…”

“…Research (Lambert et al, 2021;Pannier et al, 2019;Peikert et al, 2020;Pishkuhi et al, 2018;Van Schoors, De Paepe, et al, 2019;Verberne et al, 2019) parents in the age spectrum 33-52 year. While the study's age range for children with leukaemia (Pannier et al, 2019) is 7 years of age, research (Cornelio et al, 2016;Lambert et al, 2021;Pannier et al, 2019;Pishkuhi et al, 2018;Raber et al, 2020;Supriatin & Oktaviani, 2019;Van Schoors, De Paepe, et al, 2019;Verberne et al, 2019) using studies from using and the age range of 1-17 years (Shattnawi et al, 2021) Aged 18 years. The extracted content is divided into eight main subheadings, which cover topics such as parents' fear of their children dying, parents' inability to respond to their children's questions, parents' inability to behave appropriately when confronting them when they are angry, parents' suffering from treatment side effects in their children, the stress of the family's financial, social, and psychological burden, a lack of time, the effects of spiritual support, and more.…”