Children's knowledge acquisition initially occurs by means of external mediation, where an external object to the child, which may be an adult, mediates between her and the content to be acquired. Therefore, hospitalization may become a risk factor to children's psychological development, in both the cognitive and affective realms, in case their potentialities are not mediated by the health team, which maintains a close contact with children during such period. The knowledge concerning the child development process by the health professionals involved in the care of children hospitalized in a public university hospital in São Paulo state was investigated. The participants were eleven professionals, including technical and nursing assistants, and the results indicated that such professionals considered some of the aspects regarding child care to be important, such as language stimulation, attention, playing, bonding, physical contact, but they did not recognize such aspects as important for child development and elected specific professionals to be responsible for aspects of child development at the hospital, not realizing themselves as mediators in the psychosocial development process of hospitalized children.
Human development; health care team; socio-historical psychology