Care with assistive technologies: professional responsibility when learning to navigate the unforeseen in homecare services

Purpose This study aims to explore how responsibility is managed by an interprofessional team of healthcare professionals when unforeseen challenges in the use of assistive technologies in homecare raise concerns for care. Design/methodology/approach An ethnographic approach was used to study the daily work of integrating assistive technologies into homecare services. By observing 27 interprofessional team meetings, this paper investigated how challenges in using these technologies for specific cases were handled collectively through professional discussions. Sociomaterial and practice-theoretical perspectives were used to analyze actors and relations expressed as healthcare professionals discussed their concerns, and how responsibilities were reconsidered in ongoing patient care. Findings In analyzing the meeting discussions, this paper found that unforeseen challenges put the professional responsibility of the healthcare team at stake in knowing how to respond. This paper found that healthcare workers collectively managed distributed responsibilities by a) reviewing specific user cases and b) reconsidering responsibilities. This paper propose that this “responsibility work” and the care for entanglements it entails contribute to the stabilization of homecare service practices by embedding the use of technology in the constantly changing health needs of users. Originality/value This article proposes the notion of responsibility work as a constitutive part of practitioners’ knowing and learning at work in complex organizations under digital transformation. In such work, the complexities stemming from emerging concerns and specific entanglements are collaboratively managed as matters of care through professional discussions in situated workplace practices.