Poster Presentation (Nurse's Session)Introduction: Understanding how children cope with the
diagnosis and treatment of cancer is a crucial step toward
designing appropriate psycho-educational interventions.
This paper aimed to explore how Hong Kong Chinese
children cope with the diagnosis and treatment of cancer,
an area of research that has been underrepresented in existing
literature.
Methods: A cross-sectional study was employed. Eightyeight
Hong Kong Chinese children aged 9 to 16 years,
admitted for treatment of cancer in 2 paediatric oncology
units, were invited to participate in the study. A one-to-one
short interview was conducted. Content analysis was used
to analyze the interview data. The differences in coping
strategies used between children's sex and age group were
assessed by using chi-square test.
Results: Findings from this study indicated that the most
commonly reported coping strategy used by Hong Kong
Chinese children was self-control (emotion-focused). This
finding is incongruent with previous studies on Western
children in which it was found that seeking social support
(problem-focused) was the most commonly reported coping
strategy. On the other hand, this study revealed that children
used different coping strategies at different developmental
stages, with younger children used less problem-focused
and more emotionfocused coping strategies than older
children. Discussion: The diagnosis and treatment of childhood
cancer have been described as extremely stressful and
threatening experiences in the life of a child. This study has
addressed a gap in the literature by examining how Hong
Kong Chinese children coped with and responded to the
diagnosis and treatment of cancer. It is anticipated that the
information derived from this study would help nurses to
shape and design appropriate psycho-educational
interventions that can help ease the burden of cancer
treatment and provide support for childhood cancer survivors
to flight cancer and its subsequent adverse treatment effects
at every step of their long and difficult journey.published_or_final_versio