Welfare & Lavoro
Italian elections: Social workers overbooked
Social services are overbooked, resulting in poor services. Moreover their is little coordination between the social, health and juridical services.
di Staff
Liana Burlando, in charge of Italy's national foster care body (Cnsa), is not at all surprised that local social services prefer institutional arrangements to foster care. To help us understand she explains the situation: ?Take, for example, a social worker, perhaps someone who works part time and who most certainly overloaded with work. Faced with a minor in difficulty choosing foster care as the solution means: choosing and training available families, choosing the most suitable couple among them, making the match, following the integration process on a day to day basis for at least the first three months. To place the same minor in an institution means visiting them once a month, sometimes a phone call will do?.
According to Burlando this is a big, important problem: ?Our country fails to invest in human resources for social services and in contracts that allow workers to work as a team with their colleagues in the health services and the legal services to intervene in a holistic manner.?. Local authorities lack specialised foster care services, agreements between the national health service, local authorities and judicial law are missing. Awareness raising strategies aimed at potential foster parents are also missing, and by this long term strategies are needed, not spot campaigns.
Most of all local authorities lack the resources to support families who choose to open their homes to the needs of the less fortunate. ?Local authorities should keep their part of the deal with families? says Burlando, ? Seeing as we ask so much of them, we should demonstrate that we are doing all we can for them. As well as financial contribution, we should be giving them insurance, a network of other families to rely on, psychological support, incentives like not having to foot medical bills or school lunches and so on?. A dream, compared to what reality is in the world of foster care.
By prioritizing institutional care costs for local authorities are high (80-120 euros a day per child) and creates a vicious circle that means they are not able to invest in alternative measures, such as foster care campaigns and training programmes.
