TEHRAN (MNA) – Before the pandemic, all the stages of providing support services to children suffering from cancer were done in person at the hospitals by MAHAK’s mandatory and volunteer social workers.
However, with the spread of Coronavirus, to maintain social distancing and to prevent virus transmission, most face-to-face activities of MAHAK were stopped in some hospitals. Since the continuity of connection between social workers and patient family is vital, the necessary measures were taken to provide the same services remotely to preserve children’s quality of life.
To provide these services for children with the highest possible quality, MAHAK’s social workers are cooperating with a hundred haematologist-oncologists as well as medical care teams in all public and university hospitals all over the country. Physicians and the medical care teams introduce children who are diagnosed with cancer recently to MAHAK to be supported. MAHAK social workers identify their needs through telephone or face-to-face communication and take action to provide them with proper service. Since one of the main goals of MAHAK is to maintain the quality of provided support services in any situation, social workers are present in hospitals in different cities on certain days and deliver the required services to children and their families in person.
Following up on the psychological condition of children with cancer and their families, training parents to support their child and managing the patient’s relationship with other family members are among the diverse measures the social workers are taken.
Since access to qualified and integrated support services should be for all, MAHAK provides all these services not only for the children admitted to MAHAK Hospital but also for all children suffering from cancer throughout the country.