The award-winning Contact magazine is a free quarterly magazine for families of children and young people with cancer.
Launched in 2004, it acts as an essential source of information and reduces the isolation that families with children diagnosed with a rare disease, such as cancer, inevitably face. Each themed issue focuses on one aspect of cancer in children and young people, and contains informative articles by childhood cancer professionals and stories from parents, young people and childhood cancer survivors.
It can be a challenge to go on holiday when a child has cancer, but it's a chance for families to leave the clinical routine behind and escape for a few days. Our helpful guide on pages 8-9 offers support and advice on planning a holiday. Sunny days can always help lift our mood and improve our emotional wellbeing even when life isn't going as planned. Elsewhere, psychologist Dr Amandeep Samrai gives expert tips on self-care and coping strategies and explains where to access support.
When one door closes and a new one opens, it's a time of reflection and acceptance as well as the promise of a fresh start and opportunity. After a cancer diagnosis, families are thrown into an unfamiliar and distressing world of hospitals and treatment. This first issue of Contact for 2022 is on 'New Beginnings' and shows how families and patients can learn to live life again.
Living in the digital age has its pros and cons. The pace of technology is ever-growing. This issue celebrates how we can embrace the opportunities and challenges that the digital age has to offer in medicine, research and patient care.
Nothing about the last 18 months has been ‘normal’. We have lived through an extraordinary global event which has left its mark on all of us in some way. It’s unimaginable to know that families have not only had to face the devastation of being told their child has cancer but have also had to live through the pandemic. Life really has changed beyond all recognition for such families and adapting to a ‘new normal’ must seem even harder. But families are not alone - help and support is still there for you despite lockdown and restrictions. Read this issue to find out more on how normality is affected by childhood cancer.
Nothing about the last 18 months has been ‘normal’. We have lived through an extraordinary global event which has left its mark on all of us in some way. It’s unimaginable to know that families have not only had to face the devastation of being told their child has cancer but have also had to live through the pandemic. Life really has changed beyond all recognition for such families and adapting to a ‘new normal’ must seem even harder. But families are not alone - help and support is still there for you despite lockdown and restrictions. Read this issue to find out more on how normality is affected by childhood cancer.
Contact is now 20 pages full of interesting features, thoughts, ideas and information for all those affected by childhood cancer. Our first issue covers the theme of ‘Choices’. Our lives are made up of an infinite amount of choices that we make every day. Making a choice with confidence based on the options we have at the time is the only sensible thing we can do and sometimes there is no right or wrong, just different. In this issue, we look at the choices faced by families and professionals while caring for and treating a child with cancer.
