Conference Program

Hospital Schooling and Home Education represents one of the most challenging contexts for contemporary educational systems, as within it the right to education confronts daily the discontinuity of studies and the complexity of needs of students who, in their everyday lives, undergo medical treatments, rehabilitative interventions and long periods of hospitalisation. Illness creates a rupture in school and daily routines, distances the student from their peer group and reduces learning opportunities at a developmental stage already characterised by a particularly delicate phase of life. In this scenario, the function of the educational system is to ensure a formative continuity that depends both on access to learning opportunities which all students should be able to access and on the quality of relationships among the various actors involved: teachers, families, healthcare teams and students themselves.

This contribution offers a theoretical and interpretive reflection, grounded in international literature, on the role of teachers in interprofessional collaboration processes between school, family and healthcare team in Hospital Schooling and Home Education contexts. In particular, it analyses interprofessional collaboration processes, understood as a necessary condition for ensuring educational continuity and the well-being of the student in care.

The interpretive framework focuses on the importance of the work carried out among the various actors involved, who co-construct interventions for students in care, each with different competencies, knowledge and institutional mandates. The literature review highlights how, at times, the fragmentation of services and the ambiguity of professional roles can represent structural barriers to educational and pedagogical continuity. When teachers, psychologists, doctors and families fail to respect their respective roles, boundaries become unclear and undefined, and the child may experience a sense of loneliness and abandonment.

International research on interprofessional collaboration (WHO, 2010; Reeves et al., 2017) highlights how professionals' ability to communicate through a shared language ensures higher quality teamwork, building professional alliances aimed at promoting the psychophysical well-being of the student in care. Clear role boundaries and shared educational goals are key to interprofessional collaboration. The contribution adopts the concept of the mesosystem (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) to analyse the conditions that make possible an educational intervention centred on and structured within the daily practices of care contexts, characterised by interprofessional collaboration, through the interrelations among the various microsystems in which the patient is embedded: family, school, hospital. It is therefore of fundamental importance to establish an adequate collaborative alliance among these microsystems, grounded in the recognition of the institutional actors involved as both holders and recipients of knowledge aimed at the psychological, physical and educational well-being of the student in care.

In conclusion, this contribution aims to stimulate reflection on interprofessional collaboration processes between school, family and hospital as a necessary condition for promoting the right to education of all students, even when illness arises and prevents regular school attendance. In Hospital Schooling and Home Education, the networking of various professionals does not represent an extraordinary mode of operation, but rather a habitual to ensure that students in care have equal opportunities and continuity in their educational pathways.