Skills, knowledge, and awareness of digital and technological tools are essential to improve the state of well-being and health of older adults and also to mitigate the condition of social isolation in the aging process. For this reason, it is necessary to implement a social learning of electronic/digital tools for health of older people to support the achievement of eHealth and digital competences. The paper reports the results of an Italian innovative eHealth training for the European project ACCESS. The training has been based on blended didactical and interactive educational techniques, aimed at collecting as many points of view as possible from older adults. A total of 58 older adults were recruited to attend a four-week training program, which included five modules. The results showed a statistical significant difference between the eHealth Literacy Scale (eHEALS) mean value before and after the course. A significant negative correlation was found between eHEALS and positive/total Survey of Technology Use (SOTU), suggesting an inverse relationship between positive/total SOTU and eHEALS. There is a strong positive and statistically significant relationship between satisfaction with the training and eHEALS. The results indicate that the intervention increased the digital competences of participants connected to health.

Telecare has the potential to increase the quality of care while also decreasing costs. However, despite great potential, efficiency in care practices and cost reduction remain hypothetical. Within computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), one focus of telecare research has been on awareness support in distributed real-time communication in comparison to physical meetings since face-to-face consultations have been known as the Bgold standard^of conducting care. Research has shown that it is hard to maintain qualities such as awareness through video-mediated meetings. In this research, the goal has not been to mimic the qualities of face-to-face consultations but rather to document the qualities of three types of patient meetings (consultations) and to understand in what kinds of situations each consultation type is a viable option. In this paper, we focus on the essential qualities of i) face-to-face consultations, ii) video-based consultations, and iii) telephone consultations and shed light on their affordances. The research contribution includes an extension of the affordance lens to incorporate socio-technical, two-sided affordances, that constitute important aspects for understanding complexity when heterogeneous actors co-existing in a practice, where affordances can differ for different Bsides^in the complex practice-a view that is fruitful when dealing with heterogeneous actors and a set of analog and digital tools in a practice.

Categorical work in chronic care is increasingly dependent on digital technologies for remote patient care. However, remote care takes many forms and while various types of digital technologies are currently being used, we lack a nuanced understanding of how to design such technologies for specific novel usages. In this paper, we focus on digital technologies for patient-generated health data and how their use changes categorical work in chronic care. Our aim is to understand how categorical work changes, which novel forms of categorical work emerge and what the implications are for the care relation. This paper is based on an ethnographic study of healthcare professionals’ work at a pelvic cancer rehabilitation clinic and their interactions with patients. In this setting, supportive talks between patients and nurses are central. To understand the complexities of categorical work in chronic care when patient-generated health data are introduced, we contrast the traditional supportive talks with supportive talks where the nurses had access to the patients’ patient-generated health data. We identify and analyze challenges connected to novel forms of categorical work. Specifically, we focus on categorical work and how it can undergo changes. Our empirical findings show how changes occur in the way patients’ lived experience of the chronic disease aligns with the categories from chronic care, as well as in the way the nurse works with clinical categories during the talk. These insights help us further understand the implications of patient generated-data use in supportive talks. We contribute to an improved understanding of the use of patient-generated health data in clinical practice and based on this, we identify design implications for how to make categorical work more collaborative.

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Aims and objectives To describe and understand strategies that oncological nurses use to support self‐management of radiation‐induced bowel and bladder issues in pelvic‐cancer rehabilitation patients. Background Nurse‐led self‐management of radiation‐induced bowel and bladder issues holds the potential to support cancer survivors. Design An ethnographic approach was applied in this study, which adhered to Consolidated Criteria for Reporting Qualitative Research (COREQ) guidelines. Methods Data collection was conducted in Sweden between October 2015–April 2018, involving observations of nurses’ daily work, formal and informal interviews, individual and group interviews, and reviews of relevant documents used in the studied practice. Furthermore, 15 supportive nurse–patient talks were observed, and an ethnographic analysis was performed. Results The analysis identified the following three categories of nursing strategies that support self‐management of radiation‐induced bowel and bladder issues in pelvic‐cancer rehabilitation patients: encouraging self‐reflection, tailoring solutions together and keeping patients motivated. Nurses and patients jointly make sense of patients’ symptoms using data that patients collect about themselves. Based on their shared understanding, they can co‐create solutions to meet each individual patient's needs and develop routines to keep the patient motivated in performing the devised solutions. Conclusions The results indicate that the strategies nurses use to support patients in self‐management of radiation‐induced bowel and bladder issues entail intertwining patients’ experiences with their nurses’ medical knowledge and specific clinical practice. Nurses’ strategies build on their ability to connect patients’ experiences and the elements of their own work practice. Relevance to clinical practice A deeper understanding of nurses’ strategies to support self‐management of radiation‐induced bowel and bladder issues in pelvic‐cancer rehabilitation patients can improve other self‐management programmes, inform nurses’ education and aid in the design of tools for pelvic‐cancer rehabilitation support.