Caring for the elderly is like the liberalization of the electricity market – sekunde.lt

The news that the Panevėžys social service center will no longer provide home help services from September caused quite a stir.

Alarmed, the city’s elders appealed for help to the Ministry of Social Security and Labor and to the presidency, but the Municipal Council unanimously blessed the transformation affecting almost three hundred elders and about thirty employees.

Panevėžys is far from the only one to take such a step. The Ministry of Economy and Innovation and the public institution “Versli Lietuva” have even prepared recommendations for municipalities on how to transfer the provision of public services to social enterprises.

The woman from Panevėžys, who has been working as a social worker in Germany for a couple of decades, believes that transferring such services to private hands is not a good practice.

Dominika Simėnaitė from Panevėžys left for Germany in 1998. After graduating there, she has been working in the social sector for 21 years.

Dominika says that she has very diverse experiences. In Germany, social services are provided by public, semi-public and private institutions. After comparing them, in the eyes of D. Simėnaitė, the latter, with private capital, stands on the lowest rung.

“In 1995, Germany passed a law that opened the possibility for the creation of private social service providers. Almost 30 years have passed, there are a lot of private ones, but now the Germans would like to return to the old system, when these services were concentrated in the hands of one state. In the private sector, the focus is not on quality, but on quantity – the more clients, the more money,” D. Simėnaitė believes.

Read the full article in the “Sekundės” newspaper of May 9 (Thursday). Subscribe https://prenumerata.sekunde.lt/ – also available in PDF format.