Mental Health

Our mental health team aims to improve quality of life and reduce distress among young people with serious illness and their families. We have developed two novel online interventions aiming to improve quality of life in young cancer survivors (Recapture Life) and parents (Cascade). These interventions use ehealth to overcome the challenge of distance in Australia, which can make accessing specialised psychosocial support difficult. We are now leading community implementation trials for Recapture and Cascade, ensuring their sustainability outside the academic domain. The mental health team has a parent sleep program (Catnap) and was recently awarded the International AYA Global Accord Grant to create international clinician training and guidelines to facilitate end-of-life discussions with young people with cancer and cystic fibrosis.
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Research team

Dr Ursula Sansom-Daly
​Team Leader
Clare Kirton
​ILP student
Gadiel Dumlao
​Research Officer
Megan Zhang
​ILP student
Dr Holly Evans
​Post-Doctoral Fellow
Chloe Lim 
​Volunteer
Jessica Buster
PhD candidate 

Research studies

​Recapture Life is an online support program for young cancer survivors which enables them to share their experiences with other young people and learn new ways to get back to ‘normal’ after cancer.
The Cascade study aims to evaluate a new service, designed to support parents after their child finishes cancer treatment.
Difficult Discussions aims to create an Australian advanced care planning tool that will ensure young people’s voices are heard if their treatment does not go to plan, or takes an unexpected turn.

Current surveys

Improving end of life care for AYAs
This survey is being run by Dr Ursula Sansom-Daly and her team at UNSW investigating how end-of-life (EoL) care and communication for adolescents and young adults (AYAs) with cancer is delivered by clinicians working with AYAs, and to obtain professional consensus around what their needs/preferences are for training in EoL communication with AYAs with cancer. We are looking for multi-disciplinary healthcare professionals who have treated at least five patients between the ages of 15-39 years who have died from cancer. More ..