A Practice Perspective on Transforming Mobile Work

Research Background

Home care is by nature mobile work, where the care workers visit their clients around the city area and also around the clock in day and night shifts. Implementing mobile information technology in the home care environment had several issues to deal with; the biggest problems associated with home care services were the inadequacy of planning and accounting the services, the quality of care, and work related fatigue or stress amongst the personnel due to constant feelings of haste at work. Management had the opinion that most of these issues could be solved with better planning of working hours and more even distribution of care resources. There is a growing body of evidence illustrating benefits of mobile technology implemented in the context of distributed care working (Turner, 2005; Tooey, 2004; Fisher, 2003; Sausser, 2002), and also in the home care, a mobile solution was seen as only possibility for the implementation of information technology. Successful outcomes of organizational implementation of various hand held devises would suggest, for example, the decrease of time spent on documenting care or exchanging information about the clients, and the increase of time spent in the actual care work.