Long-term care for persons in care needs from the perspective of public interest

The author focuses her attention on the institutional framework of long-term care for persons in care needs in Slovakia. The institutional framework being contained, besides of others, in official documents (strategies, programs, action plans) is presented as the term of reference for practice of social work. She draws on Healy's dynamic approach and to the documents attributes a mediating position as they are the outputs of interactions and negotiations between relevant actors, on one hand, and serve as the reference framework (inputs) for social work practice, which verifies relevance of documents, on another hand. The latest national documents approved in years 2020-2021, which explicitly address the area of long-term care, are analysed in order to identify the main ideological perspectives how the long-term care is approached. Moreover, the structure of related political commitments in this field for a very near future is presented. Finally, brief remarks are made on the potential collisions between the institutional framework and social work practice in this field from a view of critical social work.