COMPREHENSIVE SUPPORT FOR BREAST CANCER PATIENTS by lana
Founded as a response to the lack of mental health services in Palestine, LANA’s mission is to provide breast cancer patients with essential mental health support through their treatment journey. Their work addresses a need for breast cancer patients, who are often confronted with a life-changing reality and require regular support as they navigate treatment options, side-effects of chemotherapy, nutrition and many other aspects.
Nivin Odeh set up LANA after she was diagnosed with breast cancer and learned first-hand the challenges of facing the disease, and going through treatment. Not only did she feel that there was a lack of psychosocial support at each step of the way, but also there appeared to be little awareness the need for such care. Thanks to Nivin’s strength and courage to change this, LANA is now a registered NGO with an established board of doctors and psychologists who support her work. The next steps are to establish trainings for social workers and nurses with the skills to support breast cancer patients through their recovery journeys.
As part of our mission at Krebsallianz we have supported a number of psychosocial trainings for cancer and palliative nurses in the past. We are proud to share that LANA is now a new partner and has begun their own trainings since early 2025.
Psychosocial Support
The initial program began with trainings for nurses and social workers. LANA organized the “patient and family centered care” training, led by a palliative care nurse and coordinator, Tamer Aljafari and mental health trainer Muna Odeh. Both have a lot of experience training medical professionals and are actively helping the mental health services on offer improve in hospitals and clinics in Bethlehem.
The nurse and social worker trainings were a success, with X participants. Many of the participants shared that they found the content really useful for their everyday work. What’s more, this initial program was setup to train four professionals (two nurses and two social workers) to be employed directly for LANA. Their roles were to accompany breast cancer patients who were already in contact with LANA throughout their recovery.
These four professionals were selected based on their previous experience, participation in the training course as well as a post-training interview. The social workers and nurses are stationed at Beit Jala Hospital in Bethlehem.
The primary objective of the psychosocial support program was to enhance the practical skills, clinical knowledge, and interdisciplinary collaboration of social work trainees operating in the hospital setting. Like many healthcare centers in Palestine, Beit Jala Hospital lacks a dedicated psychosocial support component within its staff. The integration of the social workers was to provide a safe and supportive space for patients to express their emotions freely — away from their loved ones — and to help them process their feelings in a nonjudgmental environment.
During the initial three-month phase of the program the social workers were met with a number of challenges, i.e. the lack of a private room to talk to patients, long time periods before being able to follow up with patients and the stigmatization of mental health support often resulted in patients being reluctant to share their experiences as they saw it as an extra emotional burden. Nonetheless, the social workers had many conversations with patients who said that the sessions were helpful, and that they had acquired some skills to help them deal with the stress of treatment and their cancer recovery.
While the social workers actively sought out LANA registered patients, the nurses who participated in the trainings were able to integrate their patient-centered training into their everyday interactions with patients. The objectives of the program was to provide evidence-based training in breast cancer diagnosis, treatment, and symptom management; to develop competencies in holistic palliative care, e.g., pain control, psychosocial support, and end-of-life communication as well as focus on the patient’s quality of life through compassionate and skilled care. See the full reports from both nurses Aseel Al Butmeh and Saher Al Hroub here.
At Krebsallianz we are happy to have found a new partner in LANA Association and look forward to continuing their psycho-social care program in the future.