„Das ist wirklich eine Gratwanderung“: Schlüsselprobleme der Patientinnen- und Familienedukation zu technischen Assistenzsystemen in Sozial- und Gesundheitsberufen – eine Grounded Theory

There are often considerable mismatches between technical assistance systems for home care and their potential users. Patient and family education represents a multiple methodological and subject-oriented mediation strategy that builds bridges between people and technology and thus harnesses the postulated potential of technical assistance systems. Nursing personnel seem to be predestined for this task due to their educational self-conception and their proximity to patients but have so far been inadequately prepared for it in their training.

Key professional problems of patient education on technical assistance systems in the social and health professions need to be identified in order to provide a basis for a curricular component of nursing training and studying. These represent empirically identified challenges in the field of health technology counselling, which should also enable nursing didactics to specify the relationship between technology and nursing or health professional action.

A qualitative study was carried out. Based on a method triangulation 15 interviews were conducted and then analyzed using the grounded theory methodology according to Strauss and Corbin.

The practice of tightrope walking was identified as the key phenomenon, which contains four key professional problems. The tightrope walking of the actors in dealing with the key problems results in a heuristic technology assessment in which the potential benefits and harms of technical assistance systems are weighed against each other. For this purpose, technical artifacts must be placed in a context with (1) everyday practices, (2) the sociomaterial circumstances and (3) the technological interpretations of the users.

Patient education is a suitable strategy for further professionalization in the field of health technology counselling and thus realistically utilizing the potential of technical assistance systems in home care.