At #ASH24, researcher, Colleen Kelly MD, presented findings on RISE, a Dana-Farber led program aiding low-income families of kids with cancer. Results show promise.
Poor children with cancer unfortunately are more likely to relapse and die than their non-poor peers. Unfortunately there are no interventions currently that target income poverty and pediatric oncology, so because of that we created Pediatric Rise, which is a program that provides direct cash support to families with newly diagnosed and relapsed cancer patients. So this is a single site pilot refinement study that included 10 newly diagnosed cancer patients and 10 relapsed patients, and all. Patients were assigned to the rise arm, which gave twice monthly cash disbursements to families for a total of 3 months. The program was designed based on the child tax credit, leveraging that amount of money that families got, and we were very purposeful in our intervention designed to avoid coercion and then also any loss of benefits. What we found is parents overwhelmingly liked this intervention. 100% of the funds were dispersed. Um, and that they found that it was a positive experience that allowed them to spend more time at the child's bedside and also reduced mental and emotional concerns. Um, they spent the money on really essential things like housing, food, uh, transportation, um, and said that they would recommend to many other families to have this intervention available to them. We also found that no families lost any benefits throughout the program, um, meaning means tested government benefits, so that was also a beneficial thing. Uh, what we did hear from families though is they wanted and could benefit from more money and also a longer intervention, so we've increased the amount of money we're offering and then also extended the intervention to 6 months. So then our next iteration hopefully that will be even more beneficial to families. So now we're piloting this. Um, in a two site, um, randomized control study, this RISE intervention joins a very small portfolio of interventions in pediatric oncology, and our hope is that we can continue to refine and improve on them and ultimately impact and improve pediatric cancer outcomes.
