Quality standards of Helpline Arkáda

Quality standards of Helpline Arkáda The changes brought about by the Social Services Act apply to all social services. Quality standards have been made into mandatory conditions the providers for social service must comply with. The chief mission of the standards to ensure that service provisions respect and protect the rights of both the service beneficiaries {--} users and those who provide it {--} staff. The changes also involve the inspections of social service quality, which uses the very standards as a measure of quality of the service concerned. The theoretical part of the paper deals with the mission of social work in the context of the Social Services Act and acts laying down the position of social workers that were changed after 1989. The objective of the present thesis is to compile the Arkáda Help Line Quality Standard document meeting the requirements of the Social Services Act and at the same time will reflect the given conditions applying to the very service. Up till now, the quality standards for the service concerned were no available in paper format. Specific documents had only been drafted and used with other information having been disseminated orally with no system in place. The practical part of the paper involves description of specific standards applied to the Arkáda Help Line as foreseen under research and the Social Services. The part describes the aims and methods of providing the social service, the methods of providing for the protection of rights, rules applying to talks between parties interested in the social service, individual agenda of the service provision and the method of handling documentation on the service provision. Moreover, the procedure applying to filing and settling complaints for quality and method of provision of social services is described. The paper further pays attention to the issue of linking the services provided to other available resources. Personal and organisational coverage of the social service and professional development of the staff are further quality indicators and must be incorporated within the standards. Yet another part describes availability of the social services provided in terms of locations and times, access to information on the social service provided and the conditions under which the service is provided. As the staff must be familiar with the possibility of emergency situations, the paper includes a chapter on emergency situations and rules that must be respected if the above is the case. Improving quality of the service is included in conclusion. The present document shall serve as the basis for quality standards for the Arkáda Help Line. It shall be further developed ad used under a paper on the Arkáda Help Line