A widening gap?: How the social services can support people navigating the gap between sickness insurance and social assistance

The research project focuses on the relationship between two of Sweden´s most important welfare systems: the state sickness insurance system and municipal social assistance.

Today, there are indications of a shift from the state to the municipalities, where sick people are denied sickness benefits and become dependent on social assistance.

Today, more than 24,000 people are dependent on municipal income support because they do not receive sufficient sickness benefit or sickness allowance.

Although these people have medical certificates stating that they are unable to work, they are at the mercy of a support system that is surrounded by requirements and conditions designed to activate the welfare claimant.

This raises the question of whether the support for this group is appropriate and provides the conditions for people to become self-sufficient.

As we have seen a development in recent decades where social insurances has become stricter while social assistance has become more focused on activation, there is also reason to believe that these questions have become more pressing.There is currently a lack of research that focuses on sick people who are dependent on economic support.

We identify three research gaps.- Firstly, there is a lack of knowledge about the situation of sick people seeking financial support and the barriers they face .- Secondly, there is a lack of knowledge about how municipal social services work with this group.- Thirdly, there is a lack of quantitative knowledge about the group, for example about the proportion of the group who receive financial assistance because they have never qualified for sickness benefit and the proportion who end up on social assistance after being rejected.By focusing on these three problem areas, we aim to contribute to the design of more appropriate support for sick people who are dependent on social assistance.

Our methodological and theoretical starting points combine a bottom-up perspective on the group, bringing together the experiences of sick people and social workers, with a quantitative approach that provides a comprehensive understanding.

The project will be carried out over four years at the Centre for Local Government Studies (LiU) and the Department of Political Science (LU) in dialogue with relevant partners.

The results will be disseminated through scientific publications, debate articles and a popular science monograph, as well as through workshops with stakeholders.