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Article History

Received: 19 January 2021

Accepted: 6 October 2021

First Online: 16 October 2021

Declarations

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: The study was approved by the Danish Data Protection Agency (AHH-2016-080, I-Suite no. 05078). The study is not required to be reported to the ethics committee, cf. section 1, subsection 4 of the Committee Act, and can be carried out without permission from the Research Ethics Committees of the Capital Region. According to Danish law, ethical approval is not mandatory for studies not involving biomedical issues and was, therefore, not obtained [journal nr.: 16035859].In Denmark, the task of the research ethics committee is to evaluate research projects within health sciences. A health science research project is a project which involves research on live birth human subjects, human sex cells that are intended for fertilization, human fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses, tissues, cells and hereditary components from humans, fetuses and the like or deceased. This includes clinical trials of pharmaceutical products on humans and clinical trials of medical equipment.Oral informed consent was obtained from all participants as the project adheres to the directives of the Helsinki Declaration [CitationRef removed]. The head managers acted as gatekeepers and approved our observations in the two departments. Before undertaking observations, all participants were informed about the aim of the study and were assured that participation was voluntary and that they and the results would be anonymized. Each health professional was given the opportunity to withdraw from being followed in their daily work, but none of the participants did so. Anonymity was ascertained by assigning participants a code instead of using their full names in the field notes. During the field study, we tried to act on situational ethics. Thus, we acted with respect to the private space of action of both the older medical patients and the health professionals. If we observed that unplanned changes were made to the components, we asked in an open and reflective way to ensure our understanding of the health professionals’ motives for making these changes. We strived to combine our knowledge of the current empirical context with intuition, sense, morality and responsibility [CitationRef removed].

: Not applicable.

: The authors declare that they have no competing interests.