Evaluating the Effectiveness of Education Support Programs for Hospitalized Students With Chronic Health Conditions: Protocol for a Feasibility Study of a Controlled Trial.

Chronic health conditions in children and young people can have a significant impact on their ability to maintain engagement in school, education, and learning. While this functional limitation affects only about 1.6% of all children and young people, the absolute number is not inconsequential. In Australia, for example, the number is in the order of 67,000 children and young people. Furthermore, research has shown that this group of young learners are at increased risk of lower academic, social, and emotional and quality of life outcomes than their healthy peers, both in the short and the longer term. For this reason, most pediatric hospitals in western developed countries have hospital-based schools that aim to prevent children and young people with a chronic health condition from disengaging from school, education, and learning. However, there is a lack of robust evidence of the effectiveness of these education support programs. This protocol for a feasibility study of the effectiveness of evaluating an education support program in Australia aims to identify a priori the methodological key features of a robust trial, including developing an answerable research question, choosing a controlled study design that compares the outcomes of both an intervention group and a well-matched non-intervention or control group, eligibility criteria, important and validated outcome measures such as quality of life, and how statistical data should be analyzed and reported. Lessons learned from the proposed feasibility study will be used to inform a larger-scale study.