Telecare Workers: The Invisible Profession

Telecare technologies affect healthcare in a very profound way: they transform its spatial dimensions. Patients no longer have to visit the hospital or the general practitioner’s consulting rooms frequently and doctors do not have to pay regular visits to patients’ homes to diagnose and monitor chronic diseases because interactions are mediated by ICTs. This does not mean that places no longer matter. Although telecare technologies introduce virtual encounters between healthcare providers and patients, these technology-mediated care practices are always situated somewhere. Drawing on the techno-geographical approach described in Chapter 2, I suggest it is important to take these physical spaces into account in order to understand how telecare technologies transform healthcare. Telecare technologies change the landscape of care not only by distributing care work to familiar places such as hospitals, general practitioners’ consulting rooms, and patients’ homes, but also by introducing the new spaces of telemedical centres. Most importantly, this spatial reordering of care includes a new category of healthcare providers.