Data og relationer i omsorgsarbejdet: Mellem datadrømme og virkelighed i kommunale sundhedsindsatser

While data has been used as management information in the public sector for decades, there has recently been a desire to use data to support and develop professional task solving. However, there is a lack of knowledge about how and whether this ambition is realized in practice, and this is where this article seeks to contribute. We examine this ambition based on practice in a municipal health center that offers interventions for citizens with diabetes and dementia. Using the term pair "proving/improving" (eng: "proving/improving"), introduced by STS theorist Annemarie Mol (2006), we first examine to what extent and how welfare professionals with citizen contact use data in practice, and then what the professionals understand by "data" in relation to their work, as well as whether the perceived need to use data at all resonates among the employees. The analysis shows that data in the form of statistics and "good stories" are used to "provide evidence" of the health center's activities upwards in the administration and outwards among the municipality's citizens. The health center's professional system is used as a platform for journaling and coordinating collegial collaboration, while information that is part of the professional task solution is primarily collected from conversations with the citizen; however, this information is not experienced as "data" in the strict sense. Even if the health center's management expresses a potential in using data to improve task solving, professionals with citizen contact cannot recognize such as they want to focus on the meeting with the individual citizen.