By Adam James Abrahami MCP, MA, BA (Hons), CEO & Founder H2o Networks
Adam James Abrahami has spent 26 years working alongside care homes and their technology. Here, he explores what really happens when systems fail and why the problem is rarely the technology itself.
The below is written from the perspective of a care home manager.
It started with a flicker. The Wi-Fi went out halfway through the medication round. Not unusual. Just one of those things that happens often enough that you sigh, reset the router, and carry on. But then the phones went dead. And suddenly, we weren’t just disconnected. We were invisible.
No calls coming in. No calls going out. No way to contact GPs. No way for families to reach us. Just a handful of staff standing by the fire door, holding personal mobiles up in the air, hoping for a signal strong enough to get through.
I remember watching it unfold like a slow leak in a lifeboat. Carers scribbling notes by hand, trying not to miss anything important. A nurse pacing, phone pressed to her ear, calling back a GP from her own mobile. A resident’s daughter arriving in tears, convinced we were ignoring her calls on purpose. Families ringing again and again. Staff apologising for things completely outside their control. Care continuing, because it always does, but with an extra layer of stress that no one needed.
It was more than a technical issue. It was everything we rely on disappearing at once.
As the manager, I’d been holding the digital duct tape together for years. Rebooting routers. Calling “the IT” and “the Wi-Fi people”. Explaining, again, how to log things on paper when systems went down. Teaching carers how to adapt, because in care, we always adapt. You get used to it. You build workarounds. You tell yourself it’s just part of the job.
But that day felt different.
“This isn’t about Wi-Fi,” I remember saying later. “It’s about safety. It’s about trust. And we are one outage away from something we can’t undo.”
I sat down with the care home owner that afternoon. Not to point fingers, but because something had finally reached a breaking point. “We’re not failing because our staff don’t care,” I said. “We’re failing because the systems don’t.” To his credit, he listened.
Together, we talked through what had actually happened. And what struck us most wasn’t the outage itself, but how quickly everyone slipped into workaround mode. How normal it felt. How practised we all were at compensating for technology that didn’t quite hold up.
In situations like this, no one person is at fault. The Wi-Fi provider responded. The IT company did what they were contracted to do. The phone supplier worked within their agreed terms. Everyone played their part. And yet, for hours, the home operated in a way that felt completely at odds with the standards we work so hard to uphold.
We often call these moments “IT failures”. But rarely are they about something simply breaking. More often, they’re about how technology has been chosen, layered, and connected over time. A phone system added here. A care platform added there. A broadband contract renewed without really revisiting what the home now depends on. Sometimes, it also includes technology that was never resilient enough for care in the first place.
Each decision made sense at the time. But together, they created a fragile setup where too much rested on too little. Everything works. Until it doesn’t.
Over the years, working alongside care homes, I’ve seen this same moment repeat itself. Different buildings. Different teams. Identical consequences.
The real risk is that this fragility is invisible. There’s no warning light that tells you, “If this goes down, your phones will too.” No alert that says, “Your backup plan relies on the same thing that’s about to fail.” And because outages are treated as inevitable, we rarely stop to ask a more uncomfortable question: should this really be happening at all?
Care isn’t like other sectors. When technology disappears, it’s not just inconvenient. It puts extra pressure on already stretched staff. It creates uncertainty during medication rounds and emergencies. It leaves families anxious and unheard when they just needed reassurance. And worst of all, it becomes normalised.
We would never accept clinical systems designed with a single point of failure and shrug when they collapse. Yet when it comes to digital infrastructure, that’s often exactly what we do. This isn’t about blaming suppliers, and it’s not about demanding faster response times. It’s about recognising that fixing things after failure is not the same as protecting people from failure in the first place.
In care, resilience isn’t a technical preference. It’s a human one.
That realisation changed how we approached things. Not because we suddenly had all the answers, but because we were finally willing to ask a better question: how do we make sure this doesn’t keep happening?
We didn’t want more numbers to call when systems failed. We wanted systems that kept working, even when parts of them didn’t. Because care doesn’t pause. Residents still need medication. Families still need reassurance. Staff still need support.
Looking back, that day wasn’t just about an outage. It was about recognising something deeper. When systems fail this completely, they reveal more than a technical weakness. They reveal the choices that were made long before the Wi-Fi dropped.
Technology matters. Of course it does. But on its own, it’s never enough. What really matters is whether the systems supporting care have been designed with the reality of care in mind. The unpredictability. The pressure. The fact that there is no “out of hours” when something goes wrong.
When technology is designed with that shared responsibility in mind, it stops being something teams work around and starts being something they can rely on. And that’s why, in care, the problem is rarely just the technology itself. It’s how — and why — it was designed in the first place.
