Keeping Pace With Changes in Health Care: Expanding Educational and Medical Collaboration

Exploring the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Italy's School-in-Hospital (SiHo) Services: The Teachers' Perspective

The abrupt interruption of face-to-face educational activities imposed by the Italian government in response to the COVID-19 pandemic required a rapid switch to distance learning to guarantee continuity in education. The same applied to the School-in-Hospital (SiHo) services. This paper explores the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in this specific context; we investigated the organizational changes and strategies adopted by the SiHo services and individual teachers to meet the challenges posed by this change in the educational paradigm. Moreover, the paper outlines teachers' visions about possible educational scenarios for the next academic year (2020-2021). Using qualitative methodology, the study took the form of a group interview involving 12 teachers working across 8 children's hospitals in Italy. The thematic analysis revealed a number of themes for further investigation. In terms of the actual situation during the pandemic, we identified critical issues and facilitating factors that occurred in distance learning with hospitalized students. One significant theme that emerged from the interviewees' narratives involved their general attitudes towards distance learning and their individual approaches to the pandemic. The relationship of hospitalized students to mainstream schools also proved to be an important theme, not only regarding the recent past but also the future. Finally, teachers hypothesized future distance learning scenarios for the new school year, highlighting the challenges to be faced from several viewpoints (methodological, organizational, technological, etc.).

Hospital School Teachers' Sense of Stress and Gratification: An Investigation of the Italian Context

In their daily teaching in hospitals, teachers interact within a complex interpersonal and professional network. The present study investigated what kind of professional relationships hospital teachers have with other staff in their daily work and which factors they perceive as being either stressful or gratifying in their professional activities. An online questionnaire consisting of multiple-choice items and open-ended responses was developed and distributed to all school-in-hospital teachers in Italy. A representative sample of 602 teachers responded. Quantitative findings were analyzed using descriptive statistics. The open-ended responses were analyzed by combining qualitative content analysis with statistical textual analysis using T-LAB software. The results confirm the complexity of the setting in which hospital teachers operate, one that is characterized by the wide variety of professional and non-professional roles the teachers perform. Four clusters were defined covering both the stress dimensions (Illness, Work Fragmentation, Organization, and Interpersonal Relationships) and the gratifying aspects (Work Recognition, Normalization, Human Contact, and Interpersonal Relationships). The implications of these findings for the management of hospital schools are discussed.