Quality în The Public Services

The term social service (or social welfare) refer s to the variety of programs made available by public or private agencies to individuals and families who need special assistance. Social public services are services provided to citizens by paid workers (and in some cases by unpaid volunteers and family members), to meet general social needs; they are regulated, funded or provided by local, regional or national government within the areas of health, education, social services, housing, employment and social security. Social public services capture a wide range of concepts including social welfare services, welfare systems and welfare states.

This concept has also been used to distinguish between those services that are subject to the EU’s public service obligation under the Treaty on European Union (i.e. services covered by the liberalisation and competition rules of the EU as utilities, telecommunications and transport) and the services that are provided by national, regional and local agencies to meet social needs for care, health, employment, housing, education and minimum income needs.

Service quality has been documented as one of the key driving forces for business sustainability and is crucial for firms’ accomplishment. Satisfaction is a person’s feeling of the pleasure or disappointment arising from comparing products perceived performance in relation to expectation. The connection between customer satisfaction and future intentions has been identified. Customer satisfaction is believed to be associated with fruitful customer behavior from the firm’s point of view.

Social services are a special category of public services and „represent a complex set of measures and actions realised in order to answer to the social needs of persons, families, groups or communities, to prevent and overcome dificulty, vulnerability or dependency situations, with the purpose to increase the quality of life and promoting social cohesion.”(article 5, letter d, from Law 47/2006) .

People want public services that work. They want them to be easy to find out about, simple to use and they are looking for public services that can respond to their needs. What they are looking for are services that can deal with their requirements, preferably in one go. If this is not possible, they want to know by when they will be dealt with. No one wants to be passed between different offices or handled by staff who knows little or nothing about them. People do not want to be greeted by impersonal answer phone messages or expected to complete long forms.

Providing high quality and cost-effective public services is not easy. It involves creating organisations with the right approaches, oragnisations that can establish clear ways of delivering services and putting the right people in place to respond to the needs of customers. It also requires a combination of good policy development, successful implementation, a good understanding of customer needs, sound technology, appropriate resources, a responsive organisational culture and well trained staff.