A warm welcome to the first newsletter from the MyPal project.
MyPal (Fostering Palliative Care of Adults and Children with Cancer through Advanced Patient Reported Outcome Systems) is funded by the European Commission and started on 1st January 2019. It will last for 42 months.
The project aims to improve communication between cancer patients and their medical team by using specially developed apps for reporting symptoms. This will be tested in two clinical studies: one with adults and another with children and their parents.
The purpose of the newsletter is to highlight specific aspects of the project in each issue, keeping you up-dated on its overall progress and sharing outcomes as they become available. In each newsletter, we plan to highlight specific aspects of our work and introduce you to our fantastic international team.
Focus on children
In this issue, we focus on the MyPal work with children and their parents. It includes:
- An article about the team at Saarland University Hospital Children’s Cancer Care Centre who are leading the research study with children.
- An interview with the technical team at Promotions Software who are developing an exciting “underwater game” app to engage children in reporting their symptoms better.
- A piece by Julia Downing, who leads the International Children’s Palliative Care Network, about her organisation’s role in the MyPal project.
- In addition there is an interview with Vassilis Koutkias, the MyPal coordinator.
Keep in touch
After a long hot summer, we hope you will enjoy the newsletter and stay in touch with the MyPal project on Twitter and Facebook. We are looking forward to your feedback.
Sheila Payne
Professor of Palliative Care, International Observatory on End of Life Care, Lancaster University, United Kingdom