Hospital-Based Education for Hospitalized Children: Current Practice and Future Direction

School is a normal part of childhood; but for hospitalized children, academic life may become disrupted and substantially deviate from the experiences of healthy peers. Many chronic disorders require frequent hospitalizations, resulting in loss of school days and poor academic achievement.1 The average time students with multiple disabilities are absent from school is 28.9 days each time they are hospitalized.2 Children’s hospitals provide educational services to mitigate learning loss during hospital stays and facilitate school reentry with transition plans. Specific functions of hospital-based school service programs may include course selection, one-on-one bedside or classroom instruction, examination proctoring, and plans for work completion. As such, these programs represent a unique collaboration between the health care and education systems. Despite the long-standing existence of hospital-based education programs and endorsement by the American Academy of Pediatrics,3 there are few publications describing these programs or their efficacy. Therefore, medical providers often have limited understanding of how these programs are modeled, operated, and evaluated. Our goal with this commentary is to provide a description of hospital-based education programs, give recommendations to improve the quality of services, and guide future research. At the federal level in the United States, provision of special education is governed by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This law provides federal funding to state and local education agencies to guarantee special education for students who meet 1 of the 13 eligibility criteria (eg, autism, deafness, etc). These children receive an Individualized Educational Program (IEP), which happens in the least restrictive environment. Another important landmark …