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Abstract Body

Siblings have unique relationships with lifelong significance. An understanding of their needs is vital for developing care supporting the whole family and make siblings involved in the illness process.

This presentations aims at describing experiences, issues, and potential strategies to cope with the challenges that arise for healthy siblings of children with long-term illness and is based on scientific articles covering the last ten years.

The whole family is influenced when a child in the family get a long-term illness: in daily routines, family roles and family planning. The family has to adjust to unpredictable situations and life events and they are confronted with the risk of long term treatments or even that the child may die. Siblings with an ill sibling often take increased responsibilities for family matters and change their social contacts and are no longer able to maintain their usual activities. When the illness turn out to be long-term and includes frequent hospitalisations the siblings often feel disintegrated in life, marginalised within their family relationships, and excluded from care and treatment processes. Care in the family's home is a useful complement to hospital care and can be a possibility for strengthening sibling’s life situation.

Sibling support during long-tern childhood illness in the family is vital so they do not remain in the periphery along with difficult feelings. Clinical recommendations include to facilitate family communication, increase siblings' participation in care and treatment and increase the use of eHealth and home based care for family normalisation and inclusion.