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Paper short abstract

This ethnography follows nurses who transition from bedside to remote digital care at the home monitoring centre of a Dutch hospital. Working within an emergent profession, we trace the data work they perform to co-construct the promise of distant and digital healthcare.

Paper long abstract

Digitalising care and providing care at a distance are often presented as means towards a more efficient healthcare system in the face of looming workforce shortages. However, empirical work shows that a digital transition of care is a complex, open-ended process involving shifting responsibilities, new modes of working, changing professional identities and evolving relationships between actors (Moore et al., 2023). Between the aspirational digital future and the actual, laborious reorganisation of healthcare systems arise professionals ‘in the making’, filling the (technological) gaps.

Through interviews and ethnographic observations at the home monitoring centre of a Dutch hospital, we trace the reorganization of care surrounding nurses who monitor chronic patients at a distance. Previously working at the bedside, the materiality of care changed from hands-on labour to remote computer work based on quantified metrics of health and illness. In the absence of interoperable computer systems or a clearly delineated job description, telenurses - additionally tasked with the expansion of the centre - must continuously improvise.

Our analysis focuses on the ‘meantime’ practices these nurses engage in as they fundamentally reconfigure their profession, including digital repair work and affective telecommunication to ensure patients feel ‘close’ while dealing with a technologically-mediated distance. We show how they are building and mending the unstable in-between of new technogeographies and responsibilities. Situating our findings in the theoretical notions of data work and data promises (Hoeyer, 2019; 2023), we illustrate how remote care is enacted in the open space of a profession under construction.