The tacit knowledge in activities of daily living: knowing by doing care

Abstract

This paper discusses how knowledge is generated and applied in care practice in residential aged care settings. This study focuses on how ‘care’ knowledge-base is established and applied taking into consideration the lived experiences of the residents. This paper is based on a literature review from an ethnographic project of residents’ lived experiences in Residential Aged Care Facilities (RACFs). Using ethnographic descriptions of Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) in RACFs from previous studies, the author explores the explicit medical knowledge and the tacit experiential knowledge within a theoretical framework of phenomenology and Polanyi’s epistemology. This paper aims to reveal that there exists a tacit dimension of shared knowing, doing and experiencing in ADLs for both the residents and staff in RACFs. To effectively integrate the explicit knowledge into the knowledge-base for care, the codified and generalized knowledge has to have practical application and in a form that can be acquired tacitly as embodied skills.