How Do We Understand Partnership Working? Experiences from a Telecare Project

Abstract

Implementing telecare requires experience and knowledge from different disciplines and sectors; business, technology and care. The uptake of telecare has been slow, which is assumed to be caused by difficulties in co-operation within telecare partnerships. This article presents a new approach to improve understanding of telecare partnerships. The approach builds on theories of trust and partnership working and is informed by rational choice theory. Within this article the approach is applied to recent experiences from a telecare project in Norway, to demonstrate how different ways of interpreting the complex social interactions in telecare partnerships yield new insight and understanding. Examples from the Norwegian project illustrate how different understandings of actions and choices affected trust and caused either improved or deteriorated co-operation in the partnership. The partners that were able to develop trust through a common evaluation of the problems co-operated better. However, when partners lacked or had insufficient knowledge, either of each other or of the situation, this led to disparate understandings that threatened trust and affected further co-operation. The new approach presented here is helpful in analyzing and understanding the actions of different partners within a telecare partnership and identifying why things worked well or went wrong. The approach may have wider relevance for other partnerships.