Background and Aims: Studies show that parents of children with cancer are willing to provide a variety of home care tasks to avoid hospitalization. However, intravenous chemotherapy given at home is a complex task that impacts patients, caregivers, and health professionals. The aim of this study was to develop a feasible and safe home chemotherapy intervention for children targeted to parents.

Methods: The study was conducted at the Pediatric Oncology and Hematology Department at Copenhagen University Hospital. This is the second study of the research project INTravenous AntiCancer Treatment for children and adolescents at Home (INTACTatHome). The intervention was developed in a framework of actions for intervention development within the National Institute of Health Research and UK Medical Research Councils guidelines for developing complex interventions in health care. The development was structured in three phases: 1) two workshops with multidisciplinary health professionals (n=12 and n=13) based on the nominal group technique method and focus groups to identify eligible chemotherapy treatments for parent-led home administration, 2) interviews with parents of children with cancer with experiences of intravenous antibiotics at home, on their opinions of chemotherapy administration (n= 9), and 3) pilot test of the developed intervention on three families.

Results: showed that low dose bolus cytarabine was the most eligible chemotherapy for parent-led home administration. The administration procedure, and a parent-education program were developed. The pilot test showed that the parent-led administration procedure was feasible, the parent-education program was manageable and corresponded to parents’ needs, and pilot families were satisfied and preferred homebased to hospital-based chemotherapy.

Conclusions: This development study informs the next phase of the research project that aims to test the home chemotherapy intervention in a prospective single-arm intervention study to evaluate feasibility, process, and outcome measures relevant to future larger scale evaluation and implementation.