How do we combine quality documentation with quality care in Danish nursing homes?

Once again, documentation in nursing homes and elderly care has become a hot topic. The new government encourages nursing staff to put a game of cards with the elderly over documentation, but though this may sound simple enough, documentation practices in elderly care are hard to change, i.a. because documentation plays a key role in ensuring that the elderly get the medical assistance and care they need.

Therefore, there is a need for new perspectives on the subject – and that is why the City of Copenhagen has entered into a collaboration with Innovation Fund Denmark on a new research project. Over the next three years, an industrial PhD fellow shall do fieldwork in three nursing homes in the City of Copenhagen to determine how documentation is produced and affects the staff, the elderly residents and their relatives.

Funding from the Crown Princess Mary Center

The project began as a pilot project in 2021 with start funding from the Crown Princess Mary Center. Among other things, the funding made it possible to recruit Anthropologist Mie Winther Christensen, and as research assistant she did fieldwork at a nursing home in Frederikshavn Municipality. The results of her work led to a new collaboration with the City of Copenhagen and made it possible to attract funding from Innovation Fund Denmark.

Mie Winther Christensen will now be doing fieldwork at three different nursing homes in Copenhagen and hopes the project will make us rethink the role of documentation in the sector:

“We hope to increase the quality and coherence of care and documentation among nursing staff. We do not expect to develop new technology, but rather to establish a series of principles and recommendations for improving documentation and to inspire similar initiatives in the rest of the country.”

To the City of Copenhagen, the anthropological approach is a new way to explore the role of documentation in nursing homes. And that is one of the reasons why the City agreed to the collaboration, says Lone Petersen, who is Head of the Health and Care Administration in the City of Copenhagen:

“The project focusses specifically on care, which is difficult to document, because care is essentially the interaction between staff and citizens. We therefore considered the project a unique chance to learn more.”

Care is difficult to document, because it is essentially the interaction between staff and citizens.

The project has just begun and will run until February 2026. Innovation Fund Denmark has invested a total of DKK 1.2 million in the project. On 1 March 2022, Project Head Nete Schwennesen became professor at the Department of People and Technology at the University of Roskilde, and even though she will take the project with her, she will continue to cooperate with the project group at the University of Copenhagen and Crown Princess Mary Center.