Healing a student, not just his or her disease. A Case description

Abstract

Introduction: The importance of hospital schools has been rising during the last decades. They have gained a lot of influence in the lives of children and teenagers under treatment for different diseases. Those in pediatric hematology/oncology units are not an exception. Objective: Though the hospital schools are nowadays capable of synchronize their work with the patients’ regular schools, the purpose of this project is to present and describe a case report which underlines the role of the hospital schools as themselves, as a teaching tool which is useful in the goal of educating its students in a global and comprehensive way, which includes an adequate level of demand. Method: It presents the case of a 16 years old boy diagnosed with a localized osteosarcoma that required preoperative and post-operative chemotherapy, high complexity surgery and, finally, immunomodulatory therapy for a long time. He had not any kind of learning activity, as he had finished the obligatory educational stage and was not enrolled in any school, and through the Hospital School in the Pediatric Hematology/Oncology Unit in the HM Montepríncipe Hospital became an interested and motivated student. Though its approach is necessarily cross-disciplinary, the present report has an educational perspective and it stresses the function, possibilities, advantages and disadvantages of hospital schools within pediatric oncology units and their coordination with the rest of the staff. It does it by putting the patient in the middle of its scope, through a humanist vision that emphasizes the real meaning of education. Results: The purpose of hospital schools should not be just academic, since they have a fundamental role in achieving that children and teenagers with cancer become healthy adults in a physic, psychic, social and spiritual way.