December 11, 2019 Meeting of the Social Work Specialists Cooperation Council of the Ministry of Welfare

January 6, 2020 socialWEN Actualities

On December 11, 2019, Linda Ozola, member of the board of the Social Workers Association, participated in the meeting of the Social Work Specialists Cooperation Council of the Ministry of Welfare.
Jan Muižniece, Deputy State Secretary of the Ministry of Welfare, presented Ministry plans for the reform of the custody courts. The aim of the reform is to create a system that is in the best interests of the child. The development of the system model should be completed by May 2020. The problems that the reform seeks to solve are paradigms of thinking, overlapping functions, lack of cooperation, problems of professional boundaries, improvement of the quality of decisions of custody courts. Developers of the reform model have divided the functions of the custody courts into two parts – legal functions and social functions (everything related to working with a person). There are ideas for the return of “social functions” to municipal social services. Here’s the developers’ understanding of “social work” because anything “social” could be done by a “social worker”. The Social Workers’ Society is opposed to such an interpretation, from the supportive role of the social worker to the “tough policeman”. Reform developers have not thought about which functions duplicates and whether this could also be addressed by auditing the functions and reviewing the roles and tasks of each party involved. A representative of the Social Workers’ Association believes that the solution to the identified functional problems does not require the dismantling of the institution, but the adjusting of existing systems. At the moment, there is no solution for reformers to resolve the issue like: parental divorce, who will do child removal in extraordinary cases, etc. The ministry is currently working on a common concept and only then will specific details be addressed. Ilze Skrodele-Dubrovska, Director of the Methodological Management and Control Department, undertakes to organize small sub-working groups on the reform of the custody courts.
Ilze Kurme, the head of the ESF project “Professional Development of Social Work in Local Governments” informed about the project news. Latvia is engaged in an international study on the working conditions of social workers. Currently the project questionnaire is being translated into Latvian. As soon as there is a link to the Latvian version of the questionnaire, the MoW will inform and then ask the Social Workers’ Association to help distribute the questionnaire and invite the social workers to complete it.
MoW specialist Dace Zvirgzdiņa informed about next year’s training themes that are developed in general, such as “approaches to social work”, “social work methods” and then each institution can create its own sub-themes. The number of hours in a given theme is determined by each customer according to his / her needs. The Council accept these themes.

Latvian Social Workers’ Association meets with the Norwegian Association of Social Educators and Social Workers The Latvian Parliament designates the Latvian Social Workers’ Association as being responsible for the Code of Ethics for Social Workers