According to the modern medical technique, if we find cancer early, it could cure easily, however if we
find late, it could be longer and then the help of the family and the caregiver's burden will increase.
If the treatment progresses, the primary caregiver's sycho․social stress will increase and caregiver has to
give much time to the patient, the primary caregiver should take care of the participant despite of the
sacrifice of his or her own life, therefore primary caregiver will go through the painful stress.
Childhood cancer stresses not only child patients but also parents if he or she has childhood cancer, he
has to face a brand new environment. Physically he has to face hospital, doctor, surgery, and
psychologically he has to face death, change, and grief. All of the process also painful to the parents, and
parents has to take care of the patients, so he has more burden.
In korea, according to the increase of the childhood cancer, the interest of the reducing the caregiver's
burden is increasing. In the hospital, there is social support program such as group training for the family
and family support. In this situation, there are a lot of study about the effacaciousness of medical social
work service.
so this researcher asked help to the hospital social work team and interviewed what the childhood
cancer family's needs for the medical social work through focus group interview.
The results of the research can be summarized as follows.
The mother of the childhood cancer experience the feeling of worries and insecureness because of the
unexpectable physical state of child and psychological burdensome feelings. During the treatment mothers
have to see the suffer of childhood cancer patient and worries about the recurrence and spread of cancer
Most of the childhood cancer patient's go through 2~3 years of long period of treatment, so the
caregiver's psychological stress is expected to be very high. As a result, psychotherapy program needed not only childhood cancer patient but also for their parents.
By the long period of hospital life parents don't have the time to take care of the house and doing
other house chores. They have to sleep at hospital's hard camp bed and finally they have ache all over
their body from fatigue. so to reduce the burden of caregiver, I think the participation of other family
member and family education is also important.
Childhood cancer patients have psychological depression by the physical change and in a vacuum
situation. To recover child's depression, they need are therapy and music therapy. The research also showed
that they also have a stress about study, because they have to be back to school after the treatment. I
think it needs to be a program about support for the education.