Well-being and care at home with new technologies: perspectives of home care personnel

Abstract

Purpose Finland is one of the fastest ageing countries in the world. At the same time, care personnel working with senior citizens at home care are also getting older. (OECD Economic Surveys: Finland 2020.) People at working age are expected to work longer and retire later, but simultaneously, there is a lack of care personnel. Therefore, the better utilization of technology has been stated (Technology Advisory Board 2021), but the challenges exist to the impacts and integration of technology into the home care contexts. We aim to describe how a national programme called KATI (‘Smart Ageing and Care at Home’) support the integration of new technologies and digital services for older people home care in Finland. The ultimate goal of the programme is a continuing collaborative model of technology-supported ageing and care of older people at home. In this abstract, the focus is on perspectives of home care personnel. Method The KATI programme consist of six regional projects across seven regions in Finland which represent municipalities or associations of municipalities, third and private sectors, and universities. The programme coordination rests with the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (THL), and the regional projects participate in systematic assessment coordinated by the THL and The Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd (VTT), who participates in a national programme as an expert of technology solutions. Home care personnel will be studied in the programme from three perspectives by using mixed-methods (Creswell & Clark 2018). 1) Well-being of home care personnel will be assessed by using follow-up surveys. 2) Changes that technology has in their work, service processes and impact on home care work will be studied by using follow-up surveys. 3) Home care personnel’s user experiences and attitudes towards technology will be evaluated by using interviews. While combining all this information and communicating it with regional projects we are aiming to achieve a continuing collaborative model of technology-supported ageing and care of older people at home. Results and Discussion So far, while the national programme is halfway, we have launched the baseline survey for assessing well-being of home care personnel (n=805). We have also launched the baseline survey for assessing changes that technology has in their work, service processes and impact on home care work (n=21 teams, 1-10 home care personnel per team). Preliminary results of the baseline surveys and more information about the analysis methods using inductive and deductive content analysis will be discussed at the conference.