THE ANALYSIS OF SOCIAL SERVICES’ STRUCTURE IN A SPECIFIC REGION AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE FOR HEALTH AND SOCIAL POLICY IN SLOVAKIA

Social services represent a tool of social policy as well as a dynamic social system. This article focuses on a heterogeneous structure of social service providers and it gives rise to a debate of a network optimization of social facilities in the Slovak regions in the context of demographic changes as well as morbidity of inhabitants, social dependency due to various reasons, etc. The Prešov Region had been chosen to analyze the structure of social service providers in order to evaluate an actual situation and particularities in an existing social model of a given region. The analysis’ outputs showed inevitability of an access to deeply structured data and realization of multi-dimensional analyses that reflect demographic aspects, morbidity and social dependency of inhabitants in a given region.