Consent, Resistance and Existential Proficiency in Swedish Home Care: The Presence of Digital Apps in the Daily Work of Assistant Nurses

Abstract

Digital applications integrated into assistant nurses' work phones have long been used in Swedish municipal home care to structure and monitor care tasks. However, few studies have explored how these technologies shape the everyday realities of work. This article examines digital apps both as messengers of economic and bureaucratic rationalities and as co-creators of value and priority structures in home care. While the apps promote control and efficiency, assistant nurses may tactically reposition them—foregrounding or backgrounding their influence—to safeguard relational, responsive, and communicative care practices. This resistance, aimed at preserving good care—a quality grounded in the lifeworld—paradoxically enables practical consent to austerity-driven welfare policies. Drawing on the concepts of existential proficiency and the care game, the article contributes to understanding how digital governance reshapes everyday care work and how embodied, relational competence not only endures but also resists pressures of digital governance within the system's constraints.