Telecare Infrastructures, Interruption and Different Ideas of Good

• In Event: Health, Interrupted: Infrastructures and Tinkering in Telecare

Abstract

Telecare involves using telecommunications and virtual technology to remotely monitor patients and/or deliver health services outside of traditional healthcare facilities. Governmental agencies and care providers in many countries and in many forms currently implement telecare. This requires a stable, well-organized infrastructure. Infrastructures however affect social practices, and human actors modify them.
This paper takes empirical work within telecare as its outset to discuss questions of ethics and normativity in knowledge making (Pols, 2010). The main argument of the paper is that telecare infrastructures interrupt embedded healthcare practices, and intersectoral collaborations. The discussion focuses on two questions: How are telecare solutions enacted in different locations and fields of practice, and what do different parties inside and outside telecare consider ‘good’. The digitalization of healthcare fundamentally contains ideas about the innovative nature of technology and that it can regenerate traditional forms of care. The implementation of telecare solutions, for instance, often bases on business cases, inscribing it in an economic rationality interrupting care practice and promoting alternative ideas of good.
The method of the paper is to explore the different performances of good and modes of engagement involved in telecare in relation to a group of elderly, chronically ill patients in their own homes in the region of Southern Denmark. Thus, the paper contributes to discussions of normativity in STS and in healthcare studies by exploring governmental agencies, the infrastructures and the care providers’ performances of ‘good’ and how these ideas of ‘good’ interact, exclude each other and are in conflict.

Author

• Niels Christian Nickelsen, Aarhus University, School of Education