New perspectives for educational care in the hospital

Abstract

In places of treatment there are echoes of needs that are unexpressed or that have not been reached, as Lido Valdrè claims, contemporary medicine has reached extraordinary levels of knowledge and operational capacity, yet the relationship between the patient and medicine is yet to be fully comprehended. In the specific regulations of the medical-health professions, among the most distinctive aspects emerges the relational-educational one: health education, therapeutic and prevention education, development of empowerment in the patient. The hospital, being a complex organization in continuous change towards modernity, hyper-specialization and research, often declines the requests of the staff to be a more mobile and flexible structure, to keep up with the needs of the territory, time and users. This a frequent request of high demand that does not always correspond to the availability of resources that are at hand. The professional world is considering the possibility of the insertion of a new kind of knowledge, rather of a professional figure of human relationships within the health field. This thought is what has prompted the Research Centre for Pedagogical and Educational Care and the Degree Course in Professional Education of the University of Insubria to take action with the creation of a project of investigation and experimentation in this specific field. Different hospitals and different departments are required as internship settings for students. From the many experiments gathered in the projects produced by the students and from the evaluations and references obtained by health care workers, it is possible to hypothesize that the Professional Educator can work with sense and benefit of the subjects involved in the process of care in a hospital environment: a reference figure for the processes of reception, stay and resignation, someone capable of picking up needs and noticing fragility, a proposer of strategies and procedures for intervention and mediation, a curator of the environment and facilitator of relational dynamics.