EHM - elevhälsoarbete i samverkan

Sweden got a new Education Act in 2010 (SFS 2010:800) which implied that the various professions in the student healthcare were injunctive to work more together and that their work mainly was to be focused on health promoted and preventing efforts. This has been a challenge for many schools. I came in contact with a school that has instituted a way of working that they call EHM, which is short for “ElevHälsoMöten” (student health meetings). I thereby got interested in studying if this could be a successful way of working to get closer to the assignment in the Education Act. The purpose with this study is to examine if principals, special educators’ and teachers interpretation of the assignment of the student healthcare is any different from each other and what they mean is health promoted and preventing healthcare work. The purpose is also to try to distinguish and illustrate factors of success with the organization of EHM and if it is possible to point out capabilities for further development. My ambition with this study is to make a contribution to the school in question so that they can get reconciliation on how far they have gotten in their work, in order to make additional plans for their future development of the school. I also hope that the results will inspire other schools to do changes on their work with student healthcare in order to reach a more health promoted and prevented work with a salutogenic and relational perspective. These are the research questions: Do principal, special educators and teachers have divergent comprehension of the assignment of the student healthcare and are there differences in their defining of prevented and health promoted work? Which positive and negative differences do the different professions (principal, special educators, teachers) experience between previous and present way of working? What factors of success can be identified with the organization by EHM? Are there any capabilities to development with the organization around EHM? Systems theory is used in the thesis as a theoretical framework. The theory supposes that life is consisted by different systems that all influence each other. One individual is included in several systems. In school many different actions take place and different people in different systems meet all through the day. Systems theory will be used in the analysis in purpose to try to get sight on and explain different processes in the various systems in the school that all effect each other. The study is inspired by a phenomenographic approach which has an interest in describing phenomenon in the world such as others regard them and especially the variation between how different people comprehend the same phenomenon. The methods that are used are semi-structured interviews and structured observations. Six informants were interwied (principal, two special educators and three teachers) and two different EHM were observed. The results show that there is a difference between the comprehensions of the assignment of the student health care. The principal and the special educators accentuate the health promoted and prevented work while the teachers expect work directly with the students. They also want more guidance from the special educators. There is also a slight difference in their defining of prevented and health promoted work. The teachers mostly talk about different efforts in their own class and with the parallel class while the principal and the special educators talk more about different efforts on an organizational level. The informants see many positive differences with EHM, for example that they work together, that they are more effective and that they get a better overview. The neg-ative things about EHM are that the special educators have gotten more work than they can handle and that EHM is not often enough. Several factors of success can be identified; it´s easier to work salutogenic together, the structure is very distinct and effective and it enables a systematic work of quality. A few capabilities to development are also presented. There are for example unclarities round the assignment of the student health care. There are also some organizational questions round the cooperation between the special educators and the teachers as well as the cooperation between the teachers in the parallel classes. Last but not least it would also be interesting to let the teachers take a greater part of the pedagogical enquiries as a part of the mutual work with student health care. The shown implications are that it is important to share definitions of assignments and concepts. It also gets clear that there is a confusion round the two examinas “specialpedagog” and “speciallärare” and that their slightly different competences are not utilised. The conclusion is that EHM is a way of working that has great possibilities to increase the cooperation round student healthcare with a salutogenic and relational perspective