Parents of children with disabilities and personal assistants have sent a letter to labour and social policy minister Natalia Efremova. They oppose turning personal assistance into a formal profession. They say working conditions need to improve first. The letter responds to comments Efremova made on the show "Nedelya 150", where she backed changes to make the personal assistance system more professional.
The letter says assistants can't be expected to act professionally while the system fails to provide enough staff, decent working conditions and proper treatment. The parents want the same rules everywhere for logging work hours, and they want reports filed online — in Plovdiv, assistants have to stand in long queues outside social services offices just to hand in their paperwork.
One of the letter's authors, Ina Marinova, is a personal assistant to her own daughter. "Who's going to come and do this hard work? For looking after my daughter, for example, my pay is 699 euros," she told BNR's Horizont programme.
Marinova says people with disabilities end up stuck at home because their surroundings aren't accessible, and a rule requiring assistants to live within 5 minutes of the person they care for limits their choices. She explained that the whole point of personal assistance is to help people socialize. Children need to be around friends, taken out, taken to the seaside. She says the ministries never talk to the people actually doing this work on the ground.