Highlighting person-centredness in technology supported care within nursing homes: a multiple case study

Healthcare technologies are increasingly introduced in long-term care to support monitoring, assessment and clinical decision-making. In nursing homes, however, their use becomes intertwined with everyday care practices and relationships between professionals, residents and family members. This study explores how digital health technologies shape care relationships in nursing homes from a person-centred care perspective. Using the Person-Centred (Nursing) Practice Framework as an analytical lens, a secondary interpretive cross-case analysis was conducted based on three previously prepared narrative case reports describing technology use in different nursing homes in the Netherlands. The original case studies were reported in a narrative case format, providing contextualised insights into how technologies were enacted and experienced in everyday practice. The cross-case analysis explored patterns and variations in how technology-supported care was integrated within care relationships and organisational contexts. Across the cases, professionals and relatives described how timely information and monitoring provided reassurance and supported more responsive care. At the same time, working with technology-generated data required ongoing interpretation and contextualisation by professionals. Technology use was associated with changes in care routines and, in some instances, shifts in roles and responsibilities among professionals. Tensions between safety, privacy and autonomy were also identified, particularly where monitoring technologies were used in dementia care. These findings suggest that the value of technology-supported care does not lie in the technologies alone, but also in how they are introduced, interpreted and integrated within care relationships, professional practices and organisational contexts. Understanding technology-supported care as relational and context-dependent may help inform more person-centred integration of digital health technologies in nursing homes.