Young children and adolescents whose parents face a serious physical illness or a physical disability require information and support to cope with their everyday lives. Since 2010 health care professionals in Sweden are responsible according to the Swedish Health Care Act §2g to consider the need children under 18 years have for information, advice and support when a parent has a mental disorder or psychiatric disability, has a serious physical illness or injury, abuses alcohol or other drugs or has unexpectedly died. The paragraph is one initiative to incorporate the UN Convention of  the Rights of the Child with Swedish law. Therefore a review of published research on methods used to support children and their parents was undertaken.

Using a narrative approach, the scoping review first aims to summarise and disseminate the research findings of interventions that support children in families with a seriously ill parent. The second goal is to identify research gaps in the existing literature. In a comprehensive search, only thirteen studies were identified, indicating that little research has been conducted on improving interventions for children. Although positive results were reported from all interventions at some stage, many of the studies were small pilot studies that did not show robust proof of the effectiveness of the interventions. Overall, however, the scoping review identified promising interventions for further evaluation and underscored the need for further intervention studies. For example, our review found that few interventions examined the improvements of everyday lives of families facing serious physical illness or disability other than cancer or HIV. The measures of effectiveness for children were also limited to internal psychological symptoms of stress and depression, behavioural problems and issues regarding communication within the family. Few studies evaluated external measures, for example effects on children’s care burden, improved support from social network or school achievements.