The Duchesne Fund (managed by BRF – King Baudouin Foundation) and Kom op tegen Kanker (a campaign to support cancer patients) are trying to find innovative projects to give psychosocial support to cancer patients. 880,000 euros are available for this initiative, which will give priority to projects encouraging collaboration across linguistic borders, revealed BRF in a press release on Thursday. “Our country is proud of the excellent medical care it offers cancer patients. However we are not doing quite so well when it comes to psychosocial support of patients and their loved ones. This type of support tends to receive a more limited budget because it is not purely medical care,” points out BRF.
The initiative is therefore encouraging projects which cannot be classified as purely medical or cancer-treating in the traditional sense, but which contribute to improving the quality of life of (former) cancer patients and their families.
The 2 organisations are looking for “innovative” projects, underlines BRF. They “must improve care and bring something more to patients, they must be replicable within the global health care sector, and they must be supported by scientific research.” Public and non-profit care centres and research institutions are also being encouraged to submit projects, and any projects can come from the institutions themselves or from a community. However the jury will give precedence to projects leading to collaboration between centres in Flanders and Brussels-Wallonia. This type of collaboration will be funded even further, reveals the press release.
The Suzanne Duchesne Fund was recently created within the King Baudouin Foundation and supports cancer research in the Brussels-Wallonia Federation. In Flanders, Kom op tegen Kanker has been supporting several projects which design and test new forms of psychosocial care for cancer patients.
(Source: Belga)
