Det digitala arbetslivet

Digitalisering av sjuksköterskeyrket

Authors

• Kristofer Hansson Malmö universitet

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37447/bk.114891

Keywords:

sjukvård, digitalisering, virtuellt arbete, sjuksköterskeutbildning

Abstract

The virtual workplace

This article examines what the digitalization of healthcare has come to mean for nurses as a professional group. Digitalization is understood in the article as a term that is concerned with everything from digital surveillance systems that partially take over the nurses’ attentive observation of their patients, to healthcare meetings that do not take place in the hospital but transpire with the help of cameras and monitors. Another dimension of digitalization is that which goes beyond healthcare meetings and concerns digital journal systems and how they change working life from writing on paper by hand to having all the care of the patient visible on a computer screen. The purpose of the article is therefore to culturally analyse and examine how the working life of nurses change when healthcare and medical care are digitized. What happens when digital technology enters the profession and when working nurses have to spend an increasing amount of time in a liaison with / association with the virtual environment?

Four nurses, aged 46 years and over were interviewed based on a questionnaire with open questions. Based on the interviews, this article presents four key themes, namely (1) the actual digitalization of health and medical care and how it affects the nurses; (2) patients who via the Internet can be more apprised of their illness and treatment options and thus can also affect healthcare meetings in new ways, (3) the different contexts of digital technologies that are at risk of collapsing into each other and allowing the patient's private attitude/approach to come to the attention of the nurses, and (4) how the boundary between working life and leisure time is affected by the new technology.

Digital technology thus creates various mediated platforms that transform the interactions in, for example, a healthcare meeting. These interactions can occur both in the virtual world as well as in face-to-face relationships in a healthcare meeting. It has been central to the article's argumentation to reveal how the impact can go both ways and that this fact affects nurses working life in new and unexpected ways. Based on this reasoning, the article also argues for ethnological work life research that focuses much more on the complexity that working individuals meet, both in their profession and in spare time. There is not always a clear boundary between these two worlds. If anything, ethnological research into working life has highlighted the importance of focusing on the entire life situation of the workforce; this is something which it is even more central to make evident in relation to the digitalized working life.