A Transition Towards Digital Home Visits in Social Care and Home Health Care During the Corona Pandemic

During the pandemic, physical meetings were supposed to decrease as much as possible to avoid the virus to spread. Before the pandemic, the physical meeting favoured social care and home health care in Sweden. One solution was to digitize as many of these meetings as possible. Therefore, we investigated this transition in a web survey, including questions with predetermined and open-ended answers. The web-survey was sent to co-workers in home health care and social care in a middle-seized municipality in Sweden. The results showed that not all meetings could be transformed, like meetings with citizens with hearing or cognitive impairments. Challenges related to the transformation were instability in technical equipment, the professionals’ and citizens’ knowledge of handling technical equipment, and access to technical equipment support. Despite this did the co-workers digitize meetings whenever possible, adding operational and problem-solving attitude to the transformation. Due to this study’s limitation, like respondents from one municipality and the pandemic’s length, we intend to investigate further and understand the development of the transformation and how knowledge in the area increases