Maria Jansson

Reflections on an appreciative approach to empowering elderly people, in home healthcare

This is a reflective account of aspects of our collective concern about developing and sustaining ways that might enable elderly people to feel more empowered to exercise their right of self‐determination. This work has been undertaken in the context of home healthcare in northern Sweden. In this paper we put three espoused values ‘under pressure’ from client, professional (homecare staff) and research perspectives. We also explore three aspects of the pictorial landscape of homecare (see Figure 1). They are the notions of client participation, empowerment and ICT. The living data for this paper is drawn from two days of workshop activities with 35 homecare staff working in the municipality of Luleå, Sweden. The workshop was one outcome of the e‐Home Health Care @ North Calotte (eHHC) Project of 2003–2005. We conclude with some collective reflections about: (a) the practice of participation (dialogue) and an intention of it (empowerment) in the context of clients accelerating service change; (b) how to reframe traditional views of the relationships between research and practice and, as a consequence, open up new possibilities for understanding how elderly people’s lived experiences can be a positive force for service improvement; and (c) the use of storyboards as an appreciative approach to enable frontline staff to reflect on their work, share and learn together. Figure 1 A pictorial version of our abstract

Emphasizing technology: socio‐technical implications

Purpose – This article aims to focus attention on users of information technology (IT), especially mobile telephony. It focuses on what people actually say about mobile technology but also aims to pay attention to what they do not talk about, what is found in the silence, especially with new technology when much can be taken for granted. This latter is, according to Foucault, even more important to understand.Design/methodology/approach – The research draws on empirical research through 11 semi‐structured interviews and interviews with five focus groups, comprising between four and eight care assistants in each group. The interviews were with three women and three men between 25‐70 years old, five female public sector middle managers and care assistants from five focus groups at social services departments in the north of Sweden. A Foucauldian approach is adopted to interpret the findings and explore how their locations within the circuits of socio‐technical networks engender uncertainty with mobile techn...

Participation in e-home healthcare @ North Calotte

Participation and the contribution of participatory design methods and techniques are explored in the context of a Scandinavian Home Healthcare project. The project was undertaken during 2004--2005. Its aim was to introduce mobile ICT equipment to health care workers in order to improve planning, including quality and precision of information exchange. The study was designed according to Participatory Action Research and Participatory Design principles. Methods employed in the project were observations, interviews, future workshops, and story boards to actively involve different stakeholders. The experience of the project indicates that, although the rhetoric was that of a participatory design and research project, participants are not equally regarded in terms of experiences and knowledge of the actual practice. Assumptions about technology influence development and implementation at the expense of the actual care activity. Further, participation and participatory design techniques used in the project demonstrate the complexity of home healthcare and the necessity to involve all the different occupational groups involved in the care of the client. However, organisational boundaries reinforced shortcomings in crossfunctional and cross organisational cooperation. A final conclusion is that time for collaborative and collegial reflections is a necessity to support the learning process.

Towards sustainable business models from healthcare technology research

As demographic ageing impacts across the world, health and welfare organisations are seeking new paradigms of care that address peoples needs as well as being inherently more scalable than the incumbent processes and services. The aim of this paper is to describe the current situation in Europe with information on service provision, before signposting some possible new ways to develop sustainable business models that support care models. The paper uses a case study approach to examine the issues in the introduction of such business models, from a perspective of the translation of research proof of concepts into business services and from the perspective of developing innovations from research that address unmet or poorly considered needs of user. The paper shows how several innovative European projects are anticipating the need for service change and are designing their research outcomes to match the needs of service commissioners more fully. The conclusion discusses several different approaches before drawing together strands of the work and providing tentative recommendations on the way forward to develop new inclusive technology-enhanced services in health and social care.