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Up to date, we know little about how home care services is organized and performed at nighttime. There are no official statistics of night time care or the number of older people havingassistance at night. This paper aims to report from a survey with operation managers and theiraccounts of organization and provision of care at night.The material consisted of a sample of 37 of Sweden’s 290 municipalities, covering for urbanas well as rural areas, smaller and larger municipalities as well as bigger cities. Individualtelephone interviews were conducted with 41 operation managers responsible for night timecare. Standardised and open ended questions were raised to capture strategies of night timehome care organization and provision. The material was analysed quantitatively andqualitatively.The results revealed similarities as well as differences in organization where smallermunicipalities often had to find special solutions. The care workers had to manage emergencyalarm from the older persons as well as scheduled care work at night. The care work includeda lot of car driving and insecurity at night, such as bad weather and violence in the streets.Safety and dignity were raised by the managers as important values in provision of care, bothfor the elderly and staff.There were several challenges in demographic development and local politics, but also inrecruitment problems and staff’s working conditions. To organize for ageing in place, homecare needs to be user friendly for vulnerable persons, also at night time.

This article aims to explore and analyse how good and dignified care is perceived and expressed at night-time within elder home care services, in which night-time care represents a knowledge gap. Dignity has become a legislated value in Swedish eldercare, aiming to increase the quality of care and to clarify the ethical values of everyday care practice. The data presented here come from a qualitative case study with in-depth interviews with six care unit managers and 14 care workers in four municipalities. The analysis of the interviewees’ perceptions and expressions of good care were informed by Nodding’s concepts: responsiveness, receptivity, and relatedness. The results showed that there was a relative unawareness of the new goals of the dignity policy and there was no specific guidance regarding dignity during night-time care. The care unit managers’ perspective was mainly administrative and related to the policy level and the staff’s ability to care. The care workers’ view of good and dignified care included aspects of ideal characteristics and user-centredness with a focus on older people’s individual needs. However, good care was conditioned by time. The dignity policy, as described in national documents, was perceived by the interviewees as vague and with unreachable goals constructed on the structural level. In social care practice, however, expressions of good and dignified care were already found in care ethics, regardless of the dignity policy. By bringing relationality to the dignity discourse on the structural policy level, recognition of care may be emphasized.