How the care workforce navigates the digital ‘skills gap’: problems and opportunities from policy to practice

We show a disconnect between the assumptions made in policy discourse and the practicalities and variations in how workers adapt, apply, and develop skills. We also explore the importance of peer support, albeit hindered by time constraints and sometimes overly relying on individual workers. In addition, the paper highlights the importance of understanding how new technology adoption can be stymied by the design of the technology itself, rather than the result of the workforce's lack of digital skills <i>per se</i>. An unintended consequence of defining the problem as a skills mismatch and the solution as skilling the workforce is that the abilities of the workforce to creatively and flexibly manage the short-comings of digital devices and systems are overlooked and under-utilised - reflecting a wider failure to acknowledge and compensate care workers' skills.