Schepers Sasja, Ms
Pediatric Psycho-Oncology (PPO) Working Group Member
Sasja Schepers (1986) is a research psychologist at the Psychosocial Department of the Emma Children’s Hospital/Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She completed her first master ‘Development and Socialization in Childhood and Adolesence’ (2009) at the Graduate School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, University of Utrecht. Her master thesis addressed drawings of very preterm born children in relation to their cognitive and motor skills and was published in the European Journal of Pediatrics (2012). After she finished her research master, Sasja went (2010) to discover the world and travelled through South-Korea, Australia and New Zealand. The year after this trip (2011) she earned her second master degree as a Developmental Psychologist. In 2011 she started her current PhD project ‘Implementation of Patient Reported Outcomes Via Electronics in pediatric oncology’ (IMPROVE), which is a shared project with the Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen. The IMPROVE project aims to:
- Develop, validate and collect disease- and age-specific questionnaires for appropriate assessment (such as the Dutch psychosocial assessment tool), including reference data (questionnaire development)
- Study feasibility of implementing electronic patient-reported outcomes (ePROs) in standard pediatric oncology practice via www.hetklikt.nu (implementation process)
- Study preferences for the clinical use of ePROs and assess challenges for implementation (implementation evaluation), and
Next to her PhD project, Sasja works (2014-current) as a project coordinator on the project ‘OGZ-in-Beeld’ at the Princess Maxima Center for pediatric oncology in Utrecht, in which she tries to set up interventions that are focused on the developmental needs of children with cancer and their families. She also actively participates in several working groups and collaborates with relevant stakeholders (i.e. working group ‘Scientific Research’ of the Dutch Society for Psychosocial Oncology, collaboration with Dutch COG, joint survey project with dr. Lori Wiener (NIH, USA), focusing on what psychosocial information pediatric oncologists find useful when caring for their patients.