Trabalho apresentado em 16th Toulon - Verona Conference, 29-30 agosto 2013, Ljubljana, SloveniaThe major challenge of the European Economy on the crises time is to give adequate and
answer to social necessities of the European population. The severe financial crisis is
reflected in the answers given by the states social needs.
The effectiveness and quality of such services is becoming a very complex subject and
often difficult to solve, but the urge to respond. The emergence of many private
companies that seek to give answers to the growing social needs is another element to
consider in the context of the social economy.
The competitiveness of this sector, particularly in terms of financial profitability, assumes
that service quality is an essential component. In recent years there has been significant
increase in the quality system certification of the answers members. In Portugal there are
two specific certification schemes social responses EQUASS certification (European
Quality Assurance in Social Services) and certified according to the models of the ISS
(Institute of Social Security). The existence of these schemes together with certification based on ISO 9001, created the
need for this comparative analysis and discussion of the experiences gained, to give more
accurate information to the market of social services, as well as identify key training needs
professional sector.
The onset of the work of a Technical Committee for Standardization of quality
management systems in social responses came also reinforce the need already identified.
The objective of this work is to analyze the differences and similarities of different
certification systems and identify which kind of certification are uses in different social
institution and why
This will be a first step to the future work of comparison of those different certification
systems and elaboration of the one certification systems based on the experience and
study of the existent ones.N/
