Introduction
The adult social care (ASC) sector in England has, as with care sectors globally (United Nations, 2018), struggled with underfunding, increased demand, and decreased workforce supply. Across the four United Kingdom (UK) nations these issues represent the effects of fragmentation, privatisation, and market instability instigated in the 1980s (Rubery et al., 2015). They are issues exacerbated in recent years due to ‘Brexit’, the COVID-19 pandemic, and an ageing population (Turnpenny and Hussein, 2022). Increasingly, technology has been seen as a means of resolving pressures on the sector by delivering faster, cheaper and better care. The ‘technological fix’ has been a key feature of policy discourse globally (European Commission, 2018; World Health Organization, 2021), including in England (Eccles, 2021; Whitfield and Hamblin, 2024). The English Government has published a flurry of policy documents advocating the use of technology in care since the early 2000s (Whitfield and Hamblin, 2022; Wright and Hamblin, 2023). The types of technology referenced in policy documents vary, including digital social care records (Department for Health and Social Care, 2022a), acoustic monitoring (Department for Health and Social Care, 2021), mainstream devices such as smart speakers (Department for Health and Social Care, 2021) and ‘wearables’ (Barclay, 2022), and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to detect issues such as falls (Javid, 2022), as well as the use of digital to enhance flows of data and information both within social care and across into the health sector (Department for Health and Social Care, 2022a). There has, however, been a slower adoption of technologies than hoped for in policy aims – as well as more mixed outcomes than expected (Hirani et al., 2014; Glasby et al., 2021; Eccles, 2021). These issues are often linked in Government strategy to a lack of digital skills among the care workforce, with workers needing to upskill, and take part in formal or informal training. However, the perception of a digital-skills deficit can ‘overplay the complexity of the new skill demands’ (Lloyd and Payne, 2023: 1085). In this paper, we use case studies of seven care providers to understand existing skill levels and skill development in the sector. In doing so, we discuss whether workers’ skill levels impede the transformative potential of technology and disrupt the ‘triple-win’ discourse (Neven and Peine, 2017) in policy and practice space, which asserts that technology is good for the economy, good for people receiving care, and good for society.