Introduction
According to the 2014 China Children’s Causes of Death Report, malignant tumors rank second among children aged 5-141. With the continuous updating of comprehensive treatment methods and the improvement of treatment programs, the survival rate of children with pediatric cancers has been significantly improved, especially for leukemia, lymphoma, Wilms tumor, etc.2,3. However, the children are under the threat of death for a long time, leaving the familiar family environment, being isolated from the school learning environment, and receiving various diagnoses and treatment in unfamiliar hospitals. These are all very strong stresses that will bring different degrees of psychological discomfort and pain, which affect their quality of life4,5. Therefore, the life quality and psychological intervention of long-term survivors of pediatric cancers have received more and more attention.
Previous studies have shown that children with pediatric cancers often have a sense of social isolation, and it is difficult to return to the group of children of the same age6,7. The reason is partly due to intensive treatments causing growth arrest, body image destruction, fear of tumor recurrence. And more often, it is caused by social problems such as wasted or delayed schoolwork, reduced exercise, and worries about one’s health and reproductive ability caused by long-term treatment8,9. People are increasingly aware of the importance of the mental health of children with malignant tumors and their families. Psychosocial support teams in the United States and Canada, including social workers, clinical psychologists, and child life specialists, are committed to developing programs that can reduce the psychological burden of children with cancer and their parents, and provide powerful support for children and their families10,11. Psychosocial support can not only improve the psychological problems of children and their families but also improve the compliance of children with treatment and reduce the failure rate of treatment12.
China lags behind developed countries in terms of children’s psychosocial care, but the psychosocial needs of children with pediatric cancers and their families are attracting more and more attention from medical staff in clinical work13,14. In recent years, Sun Yat-Sen University Cancer Center has also paid special attention to the psychosocial and humanistic care of children with cancer. In 2020, the Department of Pediatric Oncology of Sun Yat-Sen University’s Cancer Center launched a “Ward School Program (WSP)”, which aims to provide psychosocial support for long-term hospitalized children with cancer. Educational support and psychological counseling, through online facetime and offline classrooms, each child is assigned a headteacher and a teacher of each subject. According to their learning needs, different subject counseling and emotional accompaniment are provided to solve the problems of lack of educational resources, psychological cognitive barriers, and prone to study weariness. The goal of this study was to comprehensively evaluate the value of WSP for children with pediatric cancers and their parents.