Becoming a Good Homecare Practitioner: Integrating Many Kinds of Work

Abstract

The paper reports from a homecare fieldwork and discusses the various types of work carried out by homecare workers. We describe formal guidelines for quality in homecare services as a background for looking deeper into the homecare practices and using them as a basis for discussing what high quality homecare is. We have identified seven types of homecare work needed in homecare: illness work, everyday life work, life-changing work, relation work, discretion work, information work and articulation work and we discuss quality in each of these as well as in the homecare as a whole. We exemplify how the quality criteria can be achieved in practice.