Abstract
Childhood cancer survivors and their parents need integrated care to help them develop functional ways of managing chronic uncertainty in survivorship. The primary aim of this pilot/feasibility study is to examine the feasibility and trends in changes on outcomes of an integrated comprehensive care and psychosocial intervention that targets uncertainty, appraisal of threat, information awareness, PTSS, health behavior, anxiety, quality of life and posttraumatic growth for youth aged 15 to 24 years who are childhood cancer survivors and 1 parent per youth participant.
The study setting will be HEROS, Yale's program for survivors of childhood cancer. Survivors, aged 15-24, and their parents will be randomly assigned to 1 of 2 treatment groups. The experimental group will receive usual comprehensive care plus telephone-delivered coping skills training (CST) termed HEROS PLUS. The CST will consist of 8 30-minute telephone sessions during which 5 coping skills are taught and practiced, and 2 booster telephone calls. The control group will receive usual comprehensive care (termed HEROS) with an option to receive delayed telephone-delivered CST, and 2 retention telephone calls. Data will be collected at 4 points in time and examined for trends toward significant group-by-time interaction effects on outcomes for participants assigned to the experimental group as compared to the control group.
The secondary aim of the study is to examine the feasibility of using the Technology Model
Carroll & Nuro, 1996) to promote intervention fidelity and control unsystematic variance in intervention delivery. The intervention will be guided by a study manual, and study interventionists will receive initial training as well as ongoing supervision in intervention delivery. An intervention fidelity measure will be derived from the manual. Intervention fidelity will be measured regularly, and the results will be considering in the analysis. The results of the proposed study will be used to estimate sample size and otherwise inform the development of a future multi-site randomized clinical trial of the integrated intervention.
|
|
|
