28 Aug 2019

Focusing on siblings of children with serious illness

From Nine To Noon, 9:25 am on 28 August 2019
A photo of a young boy sitting in the backyard with his sister

Photo: rohitseth/123RF

A Massey University study is exploring the impact on healthy siblings of the diagnosis of a serious illness in a brother or sister.

Masters student Katie Armstrong is looking into the unmet needs of the siblings of children with cancer, type 1 diabetes and cystic fibrosis.

She says when a child is diagnosed with a serious chronic illness it affects the whole family but healthy siblings can often be overlooked, and that more research is needed on the impact of that on New Zealand children.

"We have siblings who have positive impacts and siblings who have more negative impacts , those things can be 
low mood, anxiety, and they can also experience post traumatic stress symptoms.  So those are the children that we really need to be able to get in and give some good support to help them thrive".

Ms Armstrong says there are around 100,000 children diagnosed with serious chronic illness in New Zealand.

She's seeking over 400 participants in her survey which is open to anyone 16 years old or over who has a sibling or someone who was like a sibling diagnosed with cancer, cystic fibrosis or Type 1 diabetes one year ago or longer.

Ms Armstrong's supervisor,  Director of the Massey University Psychology Clinic, Dr Kirsty Ross said there is little research of this kind in New Zealand " We know from overseas research that when there is a serious illness that involves a distance to travel for treatment, families have to make difficult choices about who stays home with which child, and who goes to treatment centres and so on....we wanted to look at what's happening in New Zealand as we have geographic spread and limited resources."

The survey is supported by Canteen, Child Cancer Foundation, Diabetes New Zealand and Cystic Fibrosis NZ. To get in touch with Katie Armstrong for more information, email siblingneedsresearch@gmail.com