Robots Entering the Care Sector. The Case of a New Curriculum for the Education of Assistant Nurses in Sweden

摘要

Robots are entering care work but the development remains slow. One key issue is how to educate healthcare professionals in the use of robots. This paper explores robots in relation to the education of assistant nurses working in care for the elderly. How can we make robots part of the curriculum and what is it that future care workers really need to know? A collaboration between the Royal Institute of Technology, KTH, and 49 teachers at the College of Care and Welfare, VO-COLLEGE, in Sweden that includes teachers, two seminars, two course development meetings and one design workshop aims to explore teachers' experiences of technology in care for the elderly work and in teaching technological matters. The results show that design workshops seem to be a more useful method to generate suggestions on how robots can be better adapted to care work, compared to seminars that brought up broader, though important, questions about care work and the role of assistant nurses and care receivers. The conclusion is that a greater awareness of technology used in care for the elderly is important to contribute to a relevant adaptation of robots and to be able to meet the challenges of an increased demand for care and care professionals. Increased responsibility for this development conveyed in education can help to broaden the view of technology, from being passive recipients of technology to being active co-creators.