SOCIAL WORK IN MENTAL HEALTH IN UKRAINE: CURRENT CHALLENGES

Abstract

The importance of mental health social work is rationalized as well as its introducing into public institutions across Ukraine. Core challenges for mental health social work in Ukraine are described, namely: lack of coordination mechanism for professional activities of medical and non-medical staff which are subordinates to different ministries, lack of appropriate specific professional training on mental health social work, lack of clinical social work specialization, lack of certification and licensing for social work in Ukraine to ensure quality in social services provision and others. Lack of shared understanding of the core of mental health social work as well as its role and functions, is identified to be the key challenge for its development in Ukraine. The analysis is made based on classification of social work professions by the National Classifier for Occupations in Ukraine DК 003:2010. The latter ensures availability of a range of social work professions at different levels, which, however, sometimes have similar requirements in terms of education needed and functions performed. This leads to narrowing the social work profession understanding at the levels of community, clients, employees, policy makers. That creates obstacles for the profession development in Ukraine, as in most cases such perception of the profession is limited to individual care provided to elderly and disabled people. Also, the international approaches towards classification of social work occupations were presented by analysis of the three core groups of professions described in ISCO 08, including: 2635 Social Work and Counseling Professionals, 3412 Social Work Associate Professionals, 1344 Social Welfare Managers, as well as the relevant functions they perform. The need to review and to adjust the National Classifier for Occupations in Ukraine DК 003:2010 to the International Standard Classification of Occupations 08 is rationalized to address the above discrepancies on social workers’ functions in Ukraine.