The care of my child with cancer: a new instrument to measure caregiving demand in parents of children with cancer.

The growing societal trend toward delivering more and more illness-related care in the home, driven both by family preferences and by mandates from third-party reimbursers, places additional responsibilities for increasingly complex caregiving on parents of children with serious illness. This article reports on the development and initial field test of The Care of My Child with Cancer, a caregiving demand instrument specific to the childhood cancer population. The instrument demonstrated strong internal consistency and test-retest reliability, and exploratory factor analysis provided initial evidence for the instrument's construct validity. The instrument will now be applied in a collaborative program of nursing research to further investigate caregiving demand and ultimately to develop nursing interventions to maximize medical and quality of life outcomes for children with cancer and their families. Copyright 2002, Elsevier Science (USA). All rights reserved.