A case study dealing with hospital librarians’ work with young people

The main purpose of this thesis was to examine how hospital librarians worked with young people at a children’s and young people’s hospital in Sweden. We wanted to see how they promoted their health with culture and cultural means such as book trolleys. We did a case study, and made three qualitative interviews with the hospital librarians. The purpose was also to find out what the hospital librarians thought of young peoples. As a complement we also used textual analysis to analyse a pilot study and a few monthly programs concerning an ongoing culture project in the library. The purpose with these documents was also to see how health could be promoted by culture, and to see how young people were described. We have used two theories. One involves what roles hospital librarians fitted into while dealing with young persons. The other one deals with different aspects of health. The role that emerged most clearly among the librarians was one called the rehabilitative role. We could also find traces of this role in the pilot study, which we believe indicates why all three librarians tended to fit into that role. The librarians seemed to do their best to involve young people in the activities in the library. In contradiction to this, the documents didn’t involve young people very much; they mostly mentioned ways of working with children. Young people were only involved in a few cases. We also found that both the librarians and the documents were striving to promote health among the patients. To do this they tried to see to the well being of the whole person.Uppsatsnivå: