Assist patients with daily activities
Little of this can be handed to software today.
The documentation around care is highly automatable and that is where the time goes back. The care itself needs physical presence and someone accountable for the outcome, so this work stays where it is.
| How automatable | Barely automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Direct care and assistance |
| Jobs that do it | 9 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Vertical agents |
| O*NET activity | Assisting and Caring for Others (4.A.4.a.5) |
What this looks like on the job
Not our paraphrase. These are real task statements recorded against this activity, spread across the 9 occupations that perform it.
- Help clients improve decision making, abstract reasoning, memory, sequencing, coordination, and perceptual skills, using computer programs.
- Care for patients by changing bed linens, washing and ironing laundry, cleaning, or assisting with their personal care.
- Provide physical support to assist patients to perform daily living activities, such as getting out of bed, bathing, dressing, using the toilet, standing, walking, or exercising.
- Provide physical support to patients to assist them to perform daily living activities, such as getting out of bed, bathing, dressing, using the toilet, standing, walking, or exercising.
- Provide patients with assistance in bathing, dressing, or grooming, demonstrating these skills as necessary.
- Aid patients in dressing and grooming themselves.
- Assist patients to dress, undress, or put on and remove supportive devices, such as braces, splints, or slings.
- Exercise animals or provide them with companionship.
- Bathe patients.
- Remind patients to take medications or nutritional supplements.
- Participate in patient care tasks, such as assisting with passing food trays, feeding residents, or bathing residents on bed rest.
- Perform hygiene-related duties, such as clipping animals' claws or cleaning and polishing teeth.
- Provide patients with help moving in and out of beds, baths, wheelchairs, or automobiles and with dressing and grooming.
- Undress, wash, and dress patients who are unable to do so for themselves.
- Dust, spray, or bathe animals to control insect pests.
- Care for children with disabilities or who have sick parents or parents with disabilities.
- Wash, groom, shave, or drape patients to prepare them for surgery, treatment, or examination.
- Groom, trim, or clip animals' coats.
What we would actually use
Nothing in our landscape addresses this work. That is the honest answer rather than a padded list: this activity needs a person present, or a machine rather than a software agent.
Buy nothing for the care itself. The time comes back from the documentation around it, so the stack worth building is the recording one, on the pages for that work.
Chosen for the cheapest thing that does the job, not the best funded. Nothing on this site is sponsored, and the full landscape is there when you want to disagree with us.
The rest of the category
Context, not alternatives to weigh up. We name the layer rather than promise a named product does your specific task.
Matched from the kind of work, not from vendor marketing. Check any of them can reach the system your records actually live in — that connection, not the model, is where these projects stall.
Who does this work
9 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Assist individuals with special needs”. In practice they tend to be done by the same person, in the same sitting.
Method. The activity, its taxonomy placement and the occupations that perform it come straight from the public-domain O*NET 30.3 database. The automatability band is ours: we map each of O*NET’s 41 generalized work activities to how much of its output current software can produce, assuming a person still reviews and owns the result. It is a coarse three-way judgment on purpose. A precise-looking percentage here would be invented.