Making joint action an object of attention – workshops as tools for adapting telemonitoring services

ABSTRACT

We expose health consumers suffering from chronic diseases to many different healthcare professionals. They need services from health centres, from general practitioners and from hospitals. Lately, they are offered telemonitoring from home. This article scrutinises the implementation of telemonitoring services as a collaboration among groups of professionals. Different ideas of good care presented at a workshop are discussed based on 17 interviews, observations, photos and logbooks. This leads to the identification of three social worlds of care and their values in terms of living with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The workshop is discussed as an occasion to learn founded on the symbolic interactionist idea of learning as reflexism. That is the process where participants make their joint lines of action an object of attention. People reach out to collaborate. However, not only people but also objects such as measurements, standards and money are involved in creating and hampering collaboration among social worlds of care. The contribution is a discussion of the challenges of technologically driven innovation in healthcare understood as a learning event. The conclusion is that workshops are useful tools to understand more of the struggles of social worlds to adapt telemonitoring and to contribute to the development of joint action across sites.

Keywords:

• Healthcare
• telemonitoring
• social world analysis
• learning as reflexism
• chronic disease
• workshops

Acknowledgement

The authors thank to Stine Rath, Bente Elkjær, Maja Lotz and Roland Bal for important inputs to develop these ideas

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research is part of ‘The Infrastructure of Telecare – Imaginaries, Standards and Tinkering’ (INSIST) funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark (Det Frie Forskningsråd) [Grant number 8091-00015B].