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Becoming a Good Homecare Practitioner: Integrating Many Kinds of Work

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Abstract

The paper reports from a homecare fieldwork and discusses the various types of work carried out by homecare workers. We describe formal guidelines for quality in homecare services as a background for looking deeper into the homecare practices and using them as a basis for discussing what high quality homecare is. We have identified seven types of homecare work needed in homecare: illness work, everyday life work, life-changing work, relation work, discretion work, information work and articulation work and we discuss quality in each of these as well as in the homecare as a whole. We exemplify how the quality criteria can be achieved in practice.

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Notes

  1. Italics used in accordance with (Goodwin 1994: 606)

  2. a ‘deviation’ is a report about not having followed the formal instructions. Deviations should always be reported in case of later complaints.

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Acknowledgements

Our sincere thanks to the homecare units that let us in to observe and discuss and the many homecare workers that engaged in discussing their work. We also thank the reviewers for useful comments to improve the paper.

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  1. Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Tone Bratteteig & Ingvild Eide

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  1. Tone Bratteteig
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  2. Ingvild Eide
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Correspondence to Tone Bratteteig.

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Bratteteig, T., Eide, I. Becoming a Good Homecare Practitioner: Integrating Many Kinds of Work. Comput Supported Coop Work 26, 563–596 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-017-9288-7

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