Chronic illness confronts pediatric patients and their families with a myriad of medical as well as psychosocial burdens. The diagnosis and related socio-economic strains force affected children, adolescents, or young adults (CAYAs) as well as their families to grapple with rapid, severe changes to their lives, instability, and situations of crisis within the social system [1,2,3,4,5]. Moreover, pediatric cancer does not only have an acute medical, cognitive, and psychosocial impact. Still, it can bring about various long-term effects, including bodily deformations and impairment, reduced memory and attention function, deficient social integration, and unemployment [4, 6,7,8,9]. Overall, these manifold stressors related to the diagnosis and prognosis can lead to fear, anxiety, and guilt among the already burdened CAYAs [10, 11]. To facilitate successful coping and to increase compliance, international guidelines push for psychosocial care to become an integral part of pediatric oncological care, aiming to provide psychological guidance throughout all steps of the treatment process, starting at diagnosis and lasting until after-care [1, 12].

In addition to the aforementioned psychosocial stressors related to severe chronic illnesses, oncological disorders specifically require an array of invasive, painful, and potentially frightening medical interventions, necessitating appropriate psychosocial support and psychoeducation to prevent traumatization [3, 13, 14]. Neuro-oncological treatments include chemotherapy, radiotherapy, surgery, and stem-cell transplantation [1]. The need to undergo such treatments can have various consequences, such as physical side effects, pain, insomnia, and restrictions in daily life due to medical appointments and fatigue [15,16,17,18]. Due to the physical impact on the central nervous system, many patients also experience reduced cognitive performance in memory, speech, attention, and executive functioning [16, 19, 20]. Side effects such as hair loss or bodily deformation, as well as cognitive impairments and the inability to participate in school and social life, can further lead to impaired self-confidence and isolation as well as an emotional strain on patients and their families [10, 21, 22].

To counteract the treatment-related difficulties, tailored evidence-based interventions (EBI) have the potential to equip affected CAYAs and their families with powerful strategies to acquire the necessary resources for successfully coping with the oncological treatments [23, 24]. One critical element of EBIs is comprehensive psychoeducative preparation for complex oncological treatments. This includes the provision of all necessary information about the procedure and its mechanisms, the reasoning why it is necessary, and the steps the process entails. Importantly, this information needs to be presented in an engaging and age-appropriate manner and tailored to the patients’ and their family’s needs [25]. Moreover, patients must be provided with effective coping strategies to withstand the treatments. As summarized by Nunns et al. [26], these may include hypnosis and relaxation, or distraction and games. Before and after treatment, psychosocial support including counseling and emotional monitoring is essential to handling psychological distress as well as coping with physical effects after oncological interventions [27, 28]. The different types of interventions and their adequate use have been listed and described by guidelines published by authors such as Leiss et al. [29] or Nest et al. [27].

A steadily increasing number of EBIs has been developed and evaluated to work towards higher patient well-being and better patient education. However, the implementation of these interventions is slow and heterogeneous [30, 31]. Most psychosocial EBIs are specific to one issue and situation, such as reduced fear, cognitive training, improved manageability of administration, and increased compliance with medical interventions or family functioning [32]. Existing interventions often focus on increasing the patients’ health literacy, which has been associated with increased empowerment and autonomy, a better understanding of and control over the therapeutic process, and improved coping strategies facilitating a resilient outcome [33,34,35]. To fulfill the goals of patient education and improved patient well-being, interventions need to be constructed along with the patients’ actual needs [2, 24]. Ideally, patients and caregivers should not only be part of the evaluation of novel interventions as study participants but also following the concept of Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement (PPIE) be actively involved in the development of new interventions alongside researchers and healthcare professionals [e.g., 36,37,38,39]. Finally, for EBIs to be developed and effectively find their way into clinical practice, they should be composed considering the complex context of pediatric oncological care [30]. To facilitate the effective construction of patient-oriented, consensus-based, and feasible EBIs, the concept of quality improvement (QI) has been established. Applying methods such as the plan, do, study, and act cycles, the framework proposes for interventions to be developed with all relevant stakeholders and directly applied, evaluated, and improved within the predestined context [40, 41].

To date, no standardized EBIs have been developed that would adequately prepare pediatric cancer patients for the various burdening interventions to accompany them throughout the entire treatment process. To fill this gap, the QI project “My Logbook” project [42] aims to provide comprehensive standardized psychosocial guidance to pediatric patients by translating an evidence-based psychosocial guideline for pediatric oncological care [1] into a consensus-based, patient-centered training tool. The tool consists of a collection of topic booklets, each providing information on and interventions for a specific stage in the treatment process. The interventions included psychoeducation, reinforcement of psychosocial resources, and neuropsychological training and were evaluated in a multi-center study regarding the feasibility and efficacy of improving patients’ well-being and treatment-related knowledge. Since the first version of the “My Logbook” was developed in the context of pediatric neurooncology, four of the topic booklets specifically address invasive oncological interventions, namely radiotherapy, chemotherapy, stem cell transplantation, and neurooncological surgery. The present article aims to present and discuss the content and evaluation of these four topic booklets.