Gerontological social work – toward context, definition and challenges

Gerontological social work becomes more and more autonomous field of social work and its specificity is connected with the profile of service receivers. Elderly are the social group, who compared to other socially weak groups, have a higher level of capabilities – financial, personal, life-span, relations. They also have various needs and huge diversification inside of this age group. They are a very challenging group in the social care system because of tension between higher resources and increasing need of support. The aim of the article is to show how the gerontological social work can be described in the wide context of social work theory. There is also an attempt to define and to show the distinctness of gerontological social work as the tool of acting. The perspective of description is more theoretical than formal.