Publication details
Social exclusion of elderly people receiving care services in the perception of the workers
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| Year of publication | 2005 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | According to the social stratification elderly people belong to the group that is being threatened by the social exclusion. It might be difficult for them to participate at the welfare system and to be respected on the basis of dignity and human rights. The authors of the article have been working on the research which aim is to find out how the workers of selected social - work - service organizations are used to solve their dilemmas of the work with clients. The researchers intend to find out how do the employees deal with the various kinds of dilemmas and what pattern of behaviour do they develop. As the employees of one of the investigated organizations provide home care service for elderly people it is possible to make partial conclusions from the research concerning the factors that affect in negative way the access of the clients to the adequate level of the quality of life. Two main sources of obstacles for the elderly people to be taken care of with respect and dignity arise from the research: the family members´reluctant attitude to the needs of the elderly and the problem of insufficient finance sources that are necessary for being able to provide the required care. The workers have been facing the problem how to be effective in assisting the client to maintain good quality of life in case that the members of the family do not cooperate with the workers. That means that the family is not able or willing to take care of the elderly between the visits of the worker (they do not feed the elderly and so on) or they are not willing to buy the needy compensative aid (for instance special bed). The workers tried to explain the reasons of such a behaviour of the family and presented a dilemma which they felt in such a situations: whether to interfere into the private life of the family or not. The reaction of the workers to the dilemma varied, but in practice they preferred helpful behaviour to the family and they refused confrontation with the family members. The second source of the obstacles was the disproportion between the needs of the clients and the financial situation of the family and the home care provider as an organization as well. The dilemma concerns the question how to provide the needy (material and nonmaterial) care under the conditions of scarce financial recources. As an answer to the question workers developed a wide scale of the strategies. But these answers provoke new questions – for instance concerning the workers professional and personal self, the fairness of the system of financing the NGO´s and state or municipality governed organizations in the Czech Republic and so on. The authors discuss the further impact of the strategies that the workers developed under the dilemmatic conditions of their work on the social cohesion. |