Tensions in Remote Monitoring: Nurses’ Everyday Work in Digitally Supported Care

This study examines how nurses navigate home-based remote monitoring work in a hospital setting. Remote monitoring is increasingly used to support home-based care, yet how it reshapes healthcare professionals’ work is poorly understood. Drawing on qualitative interviews with nurses and doctors at a hospital clinic in Finland, an iterative process of interpretation and engagement with the data led to the development of five tensions between the present and future of remote monitoring work: (1) ongoing support versus anticipated patient autonomy, (2) added workload versus expected efficiency, (3) technical maintenance versus clinical interpretation, (4) selective eligibility versus broader inclusion, and (5) fragmented coordination versus integrated systems. Adopting a paradox perspective, the study treats these tensions as enduring rather than solvable. The findings show that the tensions are sustained through the relationship between present working conditions and anticipated developments in remote monitoring. The study conceptualises them as paradoxes constituted through communication, material arrangements, and the temporal connection between present work and anticipated futures.