Social Pathology and Prevention 23, 9(1):97-101

THE DEVELOPMENT OF EVALUATION OF THE SITUATION OF THE CHILD AND HIS FAMILY IN THE CZECH REPUBLIC, OR THE NEEDS OF THE CHILD ARE A PRIORITY

Petra Ďuraško Mádlová, Johana Mertová

One of the principal elements of socio-legal child protection (further referred to as sPoD) is to enable children to safely live with their families, as such an environment is the best for child development. Intervention towards family must be based on risk identification, its elimination and
regulation, in a way to provide safety of the child as well as adequate and effective support. Goal of our basic (introductory) assessment of child and its family situation evaluation is to determine whether the child is endangered (as in the situation mentioned in §6 of SPOD law) and whether SPOD relates to him or not. If it is determined that the child is endangered, organs of SPOD will perform detailed evaluation. Its result is an individual plan of child’s protection. The plan is based on collaboration between social workers of the Organ of Socio-Legal Child Protection
(further referred to as osPoD), family and child and further interested parties involved in the solution of the child’s situation. Assessment process and individual planning has been enshrined in Czech legislation since 2013 and it relies on a so-called consensual model (professional involved questions all individual parts of the problem, but he does not rate them on scale). Ability to plan individually is the basic skill set of social workers of OSPOD, and it's important to support and further develop the skill. Since the year 2019, Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs of Czech Republic (further referred to as MPSV) implemented several online workshops with topics of assessment and individual planning designated mainly for social workers of local governments with extended jurisdictions, but also for services provided by non- profit organizations, including workers from universities and higher vocational schools with social matter focus. These workshops emphasize the understanding of the
connection between detailed evaluation and individual planning of child’s  protection. Main point of these processes is to provide an individual plan that best reacts to a child's unfulfilled needs.

Published: December 8, 2023  Show citation