Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the utilisation of the safety phone service among the practical nurses and their senior customers who live alone at home in Finland. By describing the unexpected usages of this service and recent update with its monitoring device, the meaning of emergency and the consequence of the neoliberal welfare reform would be examined.

Paper long abstract:

In Finland, the safety phone service is a mean to ensure the life of

senior citizens who live alone at home. It has been designed as a device

to call in help without reaching a handset in times such as falling or

having a heart attack. The operators, who are practical nurses with

smartphones, are supposed to answer these calls and respond immediately.

Although this service is meant for extreme health emergencies, there are

many unexpected calls such as to ask for toilet assistance or daily

health check-ups. Practical nurses handle those calls with empathy, try

to meet their unexpected needs as flexible as possible. However, the

recent update for this service with more monitoring technology and the

neoliberal change on the tariff system had severe impacts on care

workers’ spontaneity and their depth of communication with service users.

Therefore, this paper examines the utilisations of the safety phone

service, based on the fieldwork in a municipality in south-western

Finland from 2013 onwards. By describing the extensive list of emergency

calls and the operators’ daily interaction with the safety phone users,

the meaning of emergency for older adults and their subjective

definition of quality of life would be examined. Furthermore, the

ethnographic account of the instalment of the latest version of the

safety phone in care homes would reveal the governmentality of the new

monitoring technology and the consequence of the neoliberal welfare

reform on the local eldercare sector.