Operation of the Hungarian social care system
In the second part of the training, the following question was in the focus: how can we consider and evaluate the social welfare (institution) system and the work of those who work there, when it is caracterised mainly by ad hoc “development”, conceptuality, poor planning and efficiency. We meet every day with dysfunctions and disturbances, as the services are known to work costly and bureaucratically. The over-labeling, judgmental (accusing) impunity, sanctioning, caretaking or paternalistic attitudes are clear: they do not undertake a proper needs assessment, have no problem solving and solution finding sytem, they often put unwanted dependence on users of services, they do not develop and do not integrate – overall they do not help. Many of them do not reach the most disadvantaged, there are no or limited institutions in the most disadvantaged and poorest settlements and regions, and there are no graduated social workers. There is often no congruency between the declared aim of the social institutions and the everyday professional activity that is taking place there. Not a commonly recognized need is the relationship between services, the joint activity of representatives of different professions. Problems of co-ordination and the difficulties of cooperation are, of course, also present in other human (eg education, employment, health) sectors.
The whole Hungarian service care system has been long the subject of professional criticism. In Hungary, we often mention shortcomings in the development of the institutional system and in particular of child welfare services. All this points to the need for a proper conceptual basis, a positive macro- and micro-level system of relationships, and calls for recurring thinking of helping identity and control, including attention.