Authors

• University of Vaasa. Faculty of Public Administration

Keywords

care of the disabled, care of the elderly, decision making, development, health services, home help, local government, local government officers, local government services, management, social services

Abstract

The dataset is part of the social and health services research in the Finnish Local Government 2004 research programme. The main themes were the administration, service provision, and development policies of home help and municipal services for the elderly and the disabled. The respondents were local government officers responsible for services for the elderly and the disabled and home help services in research municipalities. Social services for the elderly and the disabled were also studied in 1997 and 2002.

First, the respondents were asked some basic information about service provision for the elderly and the disabled in their municipality. Individual fees for different services (e.g. meal delivery, temporary cleaning service) were investigated. The number of staff in different service tasks and the percentage of family care in the social services for the elderly and disabled were charted.

The service provision of municipal services for the elderly and the disabled was investigated with questions focusing on which bodies were responsible for providing different services, whether the respondents were satisfied with the functionality of the services, which municipal bodies made the decisions concerning the use of purchased services and the provider of those services, whether services had been put out to tender, and whether the respondents were satisfied with the tendered services. Questions were also asked about the management of services for the elderly and disabled (e.g. the importance of different bodies in decision making, the role of different institutions and bodies in the functionality of services for the eldery and the disabled).

In the final section, the development policy regarding service provision was surveyed. The respondents were asked whether any surveys or interviews had been conducted to assess/improve services, whether the services had changed after 1995 in terms of the number of clients, financial resources, provision of private services, cooperation between municipalities etc, how they would rate different aspects of the services (e.g. number of staff, location and accessiblity of the services), and on which areas the development of services should be focused in the following years. The respondents were presented several statements relating to service provision for the elderly and the disabled and asked to what extent they agreed with each.

Background variables included the respondent's gender, year of birth, job title, level of education, and the number of years worked in tasks related to service provision for the elderly and the disabled.