Disabled to get extensive rights to free personal assistance
Bill to go to Parliament next month, to take effect in autumn 2009
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Those with serious disabilities are to get extensive rights to define the services that they need, and a subjective right to personal assistance.
The change in the law on services for the disabled is to be implemented as a budgetary law, for which the government’s proposal is in its final stages.
The bill is likely to come before Parliament in mid-September and is expected to take effect in September next year.
The changes require that the disabled be granted personal assistance for daily tasks, as well as for work and study to the extent that a person with a serious disability needs it.
The change also brings the right to at least 30 monthly hours of assistance for use in hobbies, participation in societal activities, and “maintenance of social interaction”.
The disabled who are institutionalised, and those who are being cared for at home by a relative are also entitled to 30 hours with an assistant. The time can be used for hobbies, for instance.
Kalle Könkkölä, the executive director of the disabled rights organisation Kynnys, feels that it is important for the disabled themselves to define the need for help, and to decide independently on assistants.
Finding the needed assistants can pose practical problems. Könkkölä says that the best way to do it would be for the “third sector” to set up independently operating assistant’s centres.
The proposed law emphasises the role of the client in defining the need for personal assistance - its quantity, quality, the time, and place.
Local authorities are worried about their ability to organise the services promised in the pending legislation, in light of the costs and the possibly thousands of assistants that would have to be recruited.
A report by the Social Services Department of the City of Helsinki calculates that unless the elderly are specifically excluded from the impact of the law, many ailing senior citizens would also try to benefit from the subjective rights of disabled benefits.
For instance, those with memory problems, dementia, arthritis, paralysis, and various conditions of deterioration might be potential users of disabled services, as the concept of “normal ageing” is limited to various types of deterioration and deficiencies.
Normal ageing does not necessarily include living in an institution, which means that the Social Services Department notes that those who are institutionalised could be seen to be entitled to assistance services.
Director Jussi Merikallio of the Association of Finnish Local and Regional Authorities says that the subjective right of the disabled to personal assistance will require great increases in municipal services. The association has not yet managed to calculate exactly how many people will need the new benefits, or the growth in the number of assistants’ hours, but at the very least, there will be more than 10,000 new clients - the physically and mentally disabled - who will fall within the framework of the proposed law.
Currently there are about 3,000 severely disabled people in assisted living either at home or in residential service units, who receive round-the-clock assistance.
Helsingin Sanomat
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| 18.8.2008 - TODAY |
 Disabled to get extensive rights to free personal assistance |
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