How to become a Guardian Angel. Providing safety in a Home Telecare Service

Drawing on ethnographic research carried out in a Catalan Home Telecare Service, in this chapter we explore how safety is provided and how, in practice, the status of a guardian angel is achieved. We particularly focus on the work of the telecare operator. The operator, as we will demonstrate, engages in two kinds of practices. On the one hand, there are what are known as securing practices. These make the system efficient and reliable while seeking to produce guarantees and to achieve a clear sense of continuity between what users need and the resources mobilised to meet these needs. However, complete 'securing' is impossible. So, rather than seeking to avoid all risks, it is better to work on the assumption that incidents and unforeseeable situations are normal. Instead of negating what does not quite fit by defining it as an exception, an accident, or an 'unsuitable demand', the service has to deal with it. This calls for another type of practice: caring practices. These caring practices constantly challenge the protocols and codes of the system. They attune to what lies in between the lines by active listening. The securing practices and caring practices provided by the Telecare Service, vital as they are to providing safety, should not be considered the planned actions of a skilful subject. Rather, they both emerge when different demands and different events link up with different understandings of what it means to properlyattend to a call. So, from the outset, it is not clear what a teleoperator has to do. In this chapter, we will outline how, in practice, this takes shape through different materialities and how, at the same time, a certain kind of safety is provided.