Kontakt 2008, 10(1):96-104 | DOI: 10.32725/kont.2008.014

Employment as one of ways of integrating handicapped citizensHealth and Social Sciences

František Radi

Trnavska univerzita v Trnave, Fakulta zdravotníctva a sociálnej práce, katedra sociálnej práce

The ability to work and to provide and maintain employment is a central dimension of the active citizenship at an individual level and the decisive condition for the economic competitiveness at the regional, national and supranational scale. Thus, experts consider employment as the most effective prevention of the social exclusion.
In the theoretical part of the article, the author considers the employment, creative human activity and its importance for man and society. He furthermore describes mental consequences of unemployment, which occur in the form of growing mental problems - insomnia, excitation, depression. Stress situations associated with unemployment can result in physiological changes in the organism such as accelerated pulse rate, hypertension, sweating, muscle tone, mental stress inducing anxiety, which may become chronic. In persons with health involvements, the consequences can be even worse. In addition, the impairments of the health condition frequently include feelings of guilt, failure, lack of success, which leads to feelings of helplessness and inferiority. Thus, to reduce the frequency of these situations as much as possible and to provide the people with health involvements with conditions on the labour market as close to those of healthy people as possible, there are provisions guaranteed by the state. One of them is supporting of employment of handicapped applicants for employment. They also include citizens with health involvements. The author described tools of supported employments and mentioned the occupational rehabilitation as well as education as main tools for acquiring the job. In the research part, the author determined how many clients of an agency of assisted employment are employed and what type of clients in terms of their handicaps visit the agency of the assisted employment and what are problems of citizens with health involvements encountered when searching for jobs in employers or whether they are satisfied with services of the agency and what change their consider as necessary - higher efficacy of the service provided or taking advantage of an assistant at the working site, etc.

Keywords: agency of assisted employment; physical barriers; integration; supported employment; occupational rehabilitation; mental barriers; labour market; education; health involvement; enhancement of awareness

Received: February 26, 2008; Accepted: May 12, 2008; Prepublished online: June 27, 2008; Published: July 27, 2008  Show citation