Leukemia Family Pressure Empirical Research

In the beginning of the certainty of pregnancy, varieties of expecting and illusions make the parents’hearts stuffed toward the expecting baby who will complete the couples to be a whole family. Yet some children are found cancer carriers intrinsically, torturing the parents by losing hearts, even bringing tremendous stresses and crises into the family.This investigation process of this research is based on the model of family stress, using the method of Colaizzi’s phenomenology to inspect the experiences of family stress and social support of those families which take care their child with Leukemia. The investigation objectives are the10families with their child with Leukemia who have been in a hospital in Shanghai’s medical center. After using a deeply qualitative interviewing with these families, their experiences of family stresses through caring for their children with Leukemia can be classified into four levels:morbid level, household level, social level and medical level. At the level of illness, the instability of physical condition of children with leukemia, which caused by strong side effects of leukemia treatment, would make their family living in stress, panic, anxiety through the treatment process. At the household level, the pressure of these leukemia families includes caregiver’s physical and mental burdens, family life disorder and heavily family economic burdens. Society-level pressure which suffer from social exclusion due to the lack of information of community in terms of leukemia. The pressure of the medical dimension focuses on the limitation of medical resource and the imperfections of policy of healthcare.In terms of their social support, there are four types of social support, namely, emotional support, instrumental support, informational support and positive social interaction, which emotional and instrument support exert the greatest influence. All of which possess elements of emphatic understanding and the needs of assistance. Social support mainly comes from the formal network (official department, medical institutions, etc.) and informal networks (relatives, friends, other children’s caregivers, etc.).This research attempts to summarize the major research outcomes of stress levels and the course of accommodation in leukemia children and their families in an effort to raise public awareness, to encourage further improvement in social welfare and related interventions from the government, and to provide appropriate. From a humanitarian stance, it is hoped that this research may break the ice and help introduce the issue to the public.