Family-Focused Preventive Interventions With Cancer Cosurvivors: A Call to Action.

Am J Public Health

Mika Niemelä is with the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Unit, National Institute for Health and Welfare, Helsinki, Finland. Catherine A. Marshall is with the Department of Disability and Psychoeducational Studies, University of Arizona, Tucson. Thilo Kroll is with the Social Dimensions of Health Institute, Universities of Dundee and St Andrews, Dundee, Scotland, UK. Melissa Curran is with the Norton School of Family and Consumer Sciences, University of Arizona, Tucson. Susan Silverberg Koerner is with the Department of Human Development and Family Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Sami Räsänen is with the Department of Psychiatry, Oulu University Hospital, Oulu, Finland. Francisco García is with the Pima County Health Department, Tucson, AZ. All authors are affiliated with the FRED (Family-Focused Research, Education and Development) network.

Published: August 2016

Health promotion and preventive action in the context of public health interventions for highly prevalent, long-term conditions such as cancer are rarely geared toward the family as a whole. Yet family members, as cancer cosurvivors, must manage their own substantial stress and multiple caregiving responsibilities and often constitute a critical nexus between individual patients and clinicians. We drew on 2 examples of cancer cosurvivorship from 2 different health service contexts, the United States and Finland. A systemic approach in public health is needed to support family members who not only have to confront the meaning of long-term conditions such as cancer but also may have to manage concurrent social life challenges and stressors such as economic hardship.

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Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4940637PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2016.303178DOI Listing

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