Amendments to the circular on basic and auxiliary benefits

The Løvemammaene discovered earlier in 2024 that changes had been made to the circular on basic and auxiliary benefits. Some changes have clearly been necessary and for the better, but at the same time we discovered a change that we reacted to.

In terms of experience, Løvemammaene's help service has had challenges over time with both municipal decisions and decisions from NAV that refer to the term "normal care" as grounds for refusal or a lower rate/scope of services than what families are actually entitled to. The term "normal care" is not defined by any public bodies, in any national guidelines or publications, and is not professionally anchored.

The concept of normal care is a self-produced guide from the interest organization HBF, and neither the source nor where the information is taken from is known to us or NAV.

Through our extensive work in the Løvemammaenes help service, we unfortunately have strikingly negative experience with the consequences HBF's normal care description has for the scope of health and care services, including the measurement of benefits and allowances, compared to children's actual need for help, e.g. when it comes to applications for relief, BPA, night shift, auxiliary allowance, etc. This particularly applies to younger children, but also to older children in whom an increased degree of independence can be expected. We also see that more medical follow-up tasks related to the child's needs are not given importance or are described as "normal care", precisely because the text from HBF does not problematize or exemplify what not can be attributed to so-called normal care tasks.

The lion mothers therefore wrote a complaint about this change in circular R06-00. The appeal process has now been completed, and Løvemammaene was upheld in the appeal. In addition, several of Løvemammaene's input have been included in the circular. We think this is very good, and we choose to write about it because we believe it is important that parents become aware of both the challenges that the "normal care supervisor" can present, as well as to inform them of the positive changes in the circular.

Below you can read the complaint we sent to NAV / Norwegian Directorate of Labor and Welfare.

It must be specified that it is clear that even if this "normal care guide" has had unintended adverse consequences, it is of course not made this way with ill will.

Below you can read the first response to the complaint that we received from the Directorate of Labor and Welfare.

Løvemammaene did not mean to ask NAV to specify conditions that do not provide a basis for benefits. We agree that this is not appropriate. What we wanted to convey was a need for a clarification of additional care work that is not covered by the term "normal care", i.e. supervision, nursing and other additional care that is considered to be beyond the norm, and that this is exemplified in the circular. We explained this more thoroughly in our reply.

Below you can read the response Løvemammaene sent to the Norwegian Directorate of Labor and Welfare.

It was important for us to clear up the small misunderstanding that we wanted a clarification of conditions that do not provide a basis for benefit, because that was not what we meant. It also enabled NAV to take a position on our input on exemplifying additional care work that is not covered by the "normal care concept", and the feedback was that Løvemammaene's input was good and was included in the circular.

Below you can read the latest letter we received from the Directorate of Employment and Welfare.

You can find the circular on basic and auxiliary benefits here:

https://lovdata.no/nav/rundskriv/r06-00