Welfare and people with disabilities

Moving to employment-oriented welfare

• •We will re-examine the allowance-offset mechanisms (Disregard), so that they are graduated and proportional and so that going out to work pays economically for welfare recipients.
• •We will connect allowances with services. Anyone who receives social support and is able to integrate into employment will receive, alongside the allowance, personal support throughout the process, tailored vocational training and strengthening of their capacity. In this way the state's social support will be oriented toward integration into employment, and not only toward ensuring subsistence.
• •We will advance mechanisms for early identification and detection of situations of risk. We will remove barriers that prevent information sharing and coordination among different government services, with emphasis on the education, health and welfare services. We will formulate a clear framework for sharing information among them, while protecting privacy, in order to allow optimal and holistic treatment of those in situations of risk.
• •We will advance proactive realization of rights: the welfare services will approach people identified as eligible for various services, mainly on the basis of identification in the health and education services. They will present them with their rights and help them realize them. This will allow early intervention by the welfare services, before deterioration into a severe crisis.

Moving to employment-oriented welfare

• •We will work to gradually update the staffing standards in the school counseling service and the educational psychology service, which are the first line in providing an emotional-mental response and in dealing with children and youth in situations of risk.

Expanding systemic responses for orphans

• •In addition, the educational staff in schools will undergo suitable training for dealing with orphanhood, in order to make sure that orphaned students receive the emotional and learning response they need.

Increasing the inclusion of people with disabilities in the community

• •We will examine the implementation of two significant reforms for people with disabilities in the health system: the reform in child-development services and the reform in rehabilitation and mobility equipment. We will set binding standards for service quality and availability, including transparency toward patients and reasonable response times. The goal is to maintain the quality of existing treatments and expand access to them.

Getting on the Straight Path!

• •We will anchor a welfare constitution that will define the system's goals, and set a single body to coordinate it. We will ensure an equal level of service in all local authorities, and connect allowances, services and employment. At the same time we will advance the preventive-welfare approach, in order to reduce dependence on social services.

"Welfare constitution" and anchoring the right to a dignified life

• •We will replace the Social Welfare Services Law with a "welfare constitution", a modern welfare law. The constitution will define the goals of the welfare system, the populations it is responsible for and the principles of eligibility for its services. It will anchor the right to a dignified life and the preventive-welfare approach, and will serve as the basis for setting professional standards for welfare services. The constitution will also guarantee the autonomy of service users and their involvement in designing their treatment plans, in line with the principle "Nothing About Us Without Us".
• •We will define a single coordinating body, which will bear responsibility for coordination among the Ministry of Welfare, the National Insurance Institute, the local authorities and the relevant government ministries.

Strengthening welfare departments in local authorities

• •We will strengthen the welfare and social services departments in the local authorities. We will increase department heads' flexibility in managing budgets, staffing positions and tenders. At the same time we will map the areas of responsibility and the tasks placed on the departments, and remove from them what is not at the core of welfare services.
• •Because the situation and capacity of the local authorities is not uniform, the decentralization steps will be carried out gradually and differentially. We will map the state of the welfare department in each authority and its level of capacity relative to the population's needs. Well-functioning authorities will receive broader flexibility, and we will learn from their best practices. Departments with a low level of capacity will receive an additional basket of resources, including budgets and staffing positions, and close support from the Ministry of Welfare's district. At the same time we will carry out ongoing monitoring of the improvement in their level of capacity.
• •In areas with small authorities that are unable to maintain welfare services of the required quality on their own, we will develop welfare services in a regional format.
• •We will re-examine the joint-funding (Matching) method, which prevents weak authorities from using budgets and deepens inequality, and ensure increased funding for welfare services and protected populations in these authorities.

Moving to employment-oriented welfare

• •We will work to remove barriers to employment that stem from the social-support policy.
• •The right to a dignified life comes with mutual commitment: the state is committed to a respectful safety net and encourages everyone who is able to integrate into employment and service.
• •We will advance proactive realization of rights: the welfare services will approach people identified as eligible for various services, mainly on the basis of identification in the health and education services. They will present them with their rights and help them realize them. This will allow early intervention by the welfare services, before deterioration into a severe crisis.

Increasing access to welfare services

• •We will increase the accessibility of welfare services for those who need them. We will turn the welfare departments in the local authorities into unified service centers (One Stop Shop) that will handle all the bureaucratic processing of service users' requests, including vis-à-vis the various government bodies. That way citizens will not have to navigate among them on their own.
• •We will increase information sharing and coordination among the various systems in order to save form-filling. At the same time we will advance digitization of welfare services, which will show users in real time the status of the requests they submitted and their rights.

Increasing the inclusion of people with disabilities in the community

• •We will advance the implementation of the existing legislation and government decisions on the inclusion of people with disabilities in the community. As part of this we will establish a dedicated ministerial committee headed by the Minister of Welfare, with the participation of all the relevant ministers, which will centralize the government's handling of people with disabilities. We will also complete the approval of the regulations under the Welfare Services for People with Disabilities Law.
• •We will work to improve the accessibility and mobility of people with disabilities in the public space. We will hold joint staff work for the planning bodies, the Disability Administration in the Ministry of Welfare and civil-society organizations, and embed accessibility considerations in the planning and design processes of public spaces in the local authorities and in institutions of higher education.

Expanding systemic responses for orphans

• •We will expand the systemic responses for minors who lost their parents.
• •We will make sure that the welfare services provide an emotional-mental response to minors who were orphaned and to the family members caring for them.

Long-term care

• •We will strengthen stability and certainty in the existing long-term-care system, and examine imposing mandatory long-term-care insurance on the entire population, in order to ensure long-term care in the future as well. As part of proactive realization of rights, we will make sure that long-term-care entitlements reach everyone who needs them, and thereby ease the economic burden that falls on families today. In addition, we will expand the responses for family members caring for senior citizens who need long-term care, and strengthen long-term-care services at home and in the community. On this, see the further detail in the Yashar! plan for the third age.