Abstract:

The analysis of educational and training need is a crucial factor for the success of the educative policy in working organisations and in healthcare structures. Indeed it considerably affects design, educative goals, cultural contents, structure, methodologies, and evaluation. Interviews, questionnaires, focus groups are effective tools to collect data, desires, working problems which ask for an educational intervention, but we also need to develop a profound and sensible critical attitude to analyse them in a deep and complex way in order to create a successful educational program. Starting from a recent research programme developed in 2017 with the collaboration of the Educational Bureau of Lodi and Crema Hospitals (Italy), this paper aims to show how a deep investigation involving ideas, images and symbolic representation of education coming from health and socio-sanitary personnel can be an effective way to build a mapping of the specific educational culture of the organisation and of its membership; a map to be used to comprehend why many educational intervention made in the past had not the hoped results and to understand how to re-project them in a more conscious way. The investigation took place through focus groups, it involved about 80 people (doctors, nurses, educators, psychologists, socio-sanitary and administrative personnel), it was led by a phenomenological approach, it includes narrative and imaginative strategies, and it comprises symbolic and artistic images used as activators of ideas, preconceptions, personal visions and metaphorical representations of the educational process and all its components (space, time, methodologies, ends and goals, teachers and relationships, evaluation process and so on). From this research was also born an educational programme of 12 hours called “Cultivate Educational Projects. From the educational need to the projection of educational events” addressed to nursing and medical coordinators, to educators and psychologists and all those who, in the hospitals in question, deal with educational and training programmes and whose core business is connected with the delicate phase of collecting and analysing the educational and training needs of their colleagues. The first results coming from this research and research-training are pretty encouraging and seem to show that to collect and study the symbolical representations of education, at least in these two sanitary contexts, can be a good strategy to improve the planning, the supply and the evaluation of the Company training.

Keywords:

Symbolic representation of education, health education, educational.