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Background: Middle managers have not received enough attention within the healthcare field, and little is known how stressful factors in their work environment coupled with a lack of adequate sleep are related to musculoskeletal pain. The aim of this study was to examine the correlation between stressful factors in the work environment, lack of adequate sleep, and pain/discomfort in three body areas. Methods: Questionnaire was sent electronically to all female nursing unit managers (NUM) in Iceland through the outcome-survey system. The response rate was 80.9%. Results: NUM who had high pain/discomfort in the neck area also had very high pain/discomfort in the shoulder area and pain in the lower back. The results also revealed positive a medium-strong correlation between mental and physical exhaustion at the end of the workday and musculoskeletal pain. Stress in daily work, mental strain at work, and being under time-pressures had hardly any correlation with pain/discomfort in the three body parts. Adequate sleep had a significant negative correlation with all stressful factors in the work environment and all three body parts under review. Conclusion: The results will hopefully lead to a better consideration of stressful factors in the work environment, sleep, and musculoskeletal pain in middle managers., Funding: This study was funded partly by The Icelandic Nurses’ Association—Science Fund.

Publisher´s version (útgefin grein), Healthcare is increasingly permeated with digital platforms supporting cooperative care involving both caregivers (i.e. nurses and physicians) and also patients. New mobile technologies allow for patients to continuously monitor and document their symptoms and gather data that can increase self-care and support the nurse's decision-making process. A design process of such platforms calls for new design approaches involving heterogeneous conditions and goals. Our research is conducted at a clinic that supports cancer patients in their struggles with treatment induced illnesses. The methodological approach is design ethnography that draws from two years of following a design process that resulted in a digital platform to support the care provided by the clinic. The aim of the paper is to analyze how the boundary objects are engaged in the design phases, both concerning what type of boundary objects as well as how they play a role in the different stages of design and we show how boundary objects in design can be used as a mediator for different users' needs and conditions. The research question that this paper explores is: what type of boundary objects can be used, and how are those boundary objects engaged in different design phases during healthcare platform design? We show how different boundary objects come into play during different design phases, from rich narratives, to conceptual formulations and finally into concrete prototypes of the platform. We argue that using boundary objects actively as design tools can inform and forward the design of healthcare platforms and that the approach can guide future design processes, where co-designing with boundary objects can be especially useful as a design approach when doing design with heterogenous user groups in complex settings, such as healthcare settings., Västra Götalandsregionen, "Peer Reviewed"

Publisher's version (útgefin grein), Telecare has the potential to increase the quality of care while also decreasing costs. However, despite great potential, efficiency in care practices and cost reduction remain hypothetical. Within computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), one focus of telecare research has been on awareness support in distributed real-time communication in comparison to physical meetings since face-to-face consultations have been known as the "gold standard" of conducting care. Research has shown that it is hard to maintain qualities such as awareness through video-mediated meetings. In this research, the goal has not been to mimic the qualities of face-to-face consultations but rather to document the qualities of three types of patient meetings (consultations) and to understand in what kinds of situations each consultation type is a viable option. In this paper, we focus on the essential qualities of i) face-to-face consultations, ii) video-based consultations, and iii) telephone consultations and shed light on their affordances. The research contribution includes an extension of the affordance lens to incorporate socio-technical, two-sided affordances, that constitute important aspects for understanding complexity when heterogeneous actors co-existing in a practice, where affordances can differ for different "sides" in the complex practice-a view that is fruitful when dealing with heterogeneous actors and a set of analog and digital tools in a practice., "Peer Reviewed"