Winner of the British Sociological Association Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize, 2012. This book traces the changes in healthcare implicated in telecare technologies: information and communication technologies that enable care at a distance. What happens when healthcare moves from physical to virtual encounters between healthcare professionals and patients? What are the consequences for patients when they are expected to do things that used to be done by healthcare professionals? What actually happens when homes become electronically wired to healthcare organizations? These are urgent questions that are, however, largely absent in dominant discourses on telecare. Drawing on insights from science, technology, and human geography, this work opens up novel accounts of the adoption and use of new technologies in healthcare. Nelly Oudshoorn shows how telecare technologies participate in redefining the responsibilities and identities of patients and healthcare professionals, introducing a new category of healthcare workers, and changing the kinds of care and spaces where healthcare is situated. This book intervenes critically into discourses that celebrate the independence of place and time by showing how places and physical contacts still matter in care at a distance.

Analyzes how healthcare practices have been transformed by telecare technologies currently introduced in the US, Canada and Europe

Argues for the importance of place and physical contact despite the move to virtual encounters between healthcare professionals and patients

Explores how telecare technologies transform the home and public places into spaces of care

Examines how telecare technologies redefine the responsibilities and identities of patients and healthcare professionals

Autorentext

Nelly Oudshoorn is Professor of Technology Dynamics and Healthcare at the University of Twente, The Netherlands. Her research interests focus around issues of the development and use of new technologies in healthcare. She is the recipient of the Rachel Carson Prize awarded by the Society for Social Studies of Science (2005), the Diana Forsythe Award of the American Medical Informatics Association (2009) and the Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize (2012).

Inhalt
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Who Cares?
Theorizing Technology and the Transformation of Healthcare
PART I: REORDERING CARE
Promises, Scenarios and Silences
Resistances and Boundary Work
PART II: CREATING NEW FORMS OF CARE
Telecare Workers: The Invisible Profession
How Places Matter in Healthcare: Physical and Digital Proximity
PART III: REDEFINING PATIENTS AND HOME
Patients as Diagnostic Agents: Invisible work and Selective Use
Inspecting Bodies and Coping with Disease at Home
Conclusions: The Importance of Place, Proximity and Diversity
Notes
Bibliography
Index