Age-appropriate multidisciplinary approach to young children with cancer undergoing radiotherapy: The SIESTA procedure.

A standardized multidisciplinary step-by-step approach to improve the compliance of young (or difficult) children having to undergo radiotherapy was described and applied. The procedure is called SIESTA, which stands for show-imagination-evaluation-support-treatment-anesthesia. Preliminary assessments suggest that the SIESTA approach was effective: the rate of young patients (≤6 years) requiring anesthesia decreased from 27% (14/52 cases) in 2011-2012 (before the procedure was adopted) to 13% (6/46) in 2018.