The Hospital School from the Health Professionals' Perspective: Roles and Collaboration

The paper explores health professionals' (HPs) perceptions of the Hospital School (HS) service, focusing on its role within the care process and on interprofessional implications. The importance of HS in ensuring educational continuity for hospitalized children is widely recognised, however, studies show that teachers sometimes feel their role is not acknowledged by HPs and that the quality of interprofessional interactions strongly affects teachers' work and well-being. Using a qualitative approach, individual interviews followed by a focus group, this study investigated HPs' point of view by asking them about 1) their perception of the HS service and teachers, 2) their interactions with HS teachers, and 3) how their collaboration might be supported. Results indicate that the role of HS is perceived in a variety of manners, and relationships with teachers are often driven by individual rather than organizational-mediated practices. Solutions proposed to better integrate HS within the hospital and strengthen collaboration between teachers and healthcare professionals highlight the need for both institutions to actively promote structured opportunities for reciprocal knowledge building, and to introduce coordinating figures that connect teachers with each other and with healthcare staff. HPs' responses in this study reflect challenges reported in the literature regarding inter-professional collaboration among HPs and suggest that some of the strategies developed to improve collaboration within healthcare teams could be adapted to strengthen cooperation between HPs and HS teachers.