Navigators of the support system – how older people understand, negotiate and coordinate home care and other forms of support in their everyday lives.

Research on home care and other forms of support for older people living at home has primarily been concerned with the conditions and views of those who provide care.

The coordination of care generally centres on outcomes as defined by professionals, whether reduced care consumption or increased professional collaboration, and rarely on how care arrangements align with older people’ everyday lives and enable them to participate in society.This stands in contrast to disability studies, where help and services are framed as part of a larger project of having a daily life and being included in society.

The proposed project posits integrated care as part of a larger project of enabling a daily life and social participation, and thus as something more than the alignment of different services.

The aim is to build user-driven empirical and theoretical knowledge of home care and support services as a relational practice, accomplished, and negotiated by older people in their daily lives.The project will be informed by pilot interviews, which indicate that older people develop active strategies to coordinate care so their everyday lives work well: they figure out responsibilities, negotiate with professionals and staff, and adjust their rhetoric according to the organisation.

The research questions will shed light on how relations and strategies evolve.

The user focus will bring fresh insights into the ways care arrangements enable or restrict older people in their everyday lives and in their participation in society.An ethnographic approach with a longitudinal element will be applied.

The project will chart care and its adaptations, with in-depth studies of how older people navigate and coordinate care and services provided in the home, as well as outside the home in the form of special transportation services.

The project will provide unique theoretical understandings of integration of care in everyday life, and ultimately improve the provision of care to older people.