Providing and Managing the Rehabilitation ServiceTwo Stage (Qualitative and Quantitative) Research

Fieldwork by Saar Poll OÜFinanced by European Social Fund

Tiina Linno Ministry of Social Affairs of Estonia,department of social policy information and analysis

April 23, 2009

Objectives of Research

• to analyse present situation and needs of R-system

• by collecting information from R-specialists of different professions

• to contribute for developingR-service as a state social service

Data Collection and RespondentsPopulation: all R-team members of Estonia

1) administrative heads, 2) team leaders3) social workers, 4) physical therapists5) occupational therapists6) speech therapists, pedagogues7) psychologists 8) doctors, 9) nurses

• Stage 1 – 9 focus groups (June 2008) – 67 members of R-teams

• Stage 2 – web survey (Sept 2008) – 53 R-team leaders (of the whole 72 at that time)

Main Messages• introduce long-term contracts for R-teams as the sign of consistent state rehabilitation policy

• define the target group (clients) proceeding from the main idea of R-service as a labour market measure

• change the service based R-system to the program and case management based system

• better integrate different sectors (social, health) and their services to achieve the mutual goals

• improve documentation and its management, introduce e-forms and modern databases

• introduce R-courses for different R-specialists as well as other client network members (incl. family)

Satisfaction with Tools andWork Conditions

• 72% rated their tools to be good or very good (average rating 3,77 on the scale of 1-5)

• 59% rated their work conditions to be good or very good (3,57)

• 64% rated their accessibility and environment for the disabled to be good or very good (3,79)

• 30% of R-teams had worked out their own quality criteria to provide R-services

• 77% rated their R-team work to be good or very good – average rating 3,91

• 59% of respondents agreed that working full time might enable a R-specialist to provide the better quality R-service

As for Quality…

Summary• Estonian R-teams have no universal quality evaluation framework

• yet, some have developed their own standards to provide R-service already now

• state conducts basic control over some principal aspects such as qualification ofR-specialist, document management etc

• R-teams seem to be very interested in creating common understanding about quality

• thus, there might be a set of universal indicators provided by the state that might get input from different quality evaluation methods to monitor R-service