Person-Centred Long-Term Care in Slovenia: Turning New Entitlements into Individualised Support

Two people placed in the same Slovenian long-term care category may need the same overall level of assistance without wanting anything like the same life. One may prioritise help with personal care so that she can continue attending community activities independently. Another may manage personal care with a spouse but need support with meals, mobility and maintaining daily routines. A third may value continuity with a family caregiver more highly than receiving formal services from several workers.

That distinction sits at the heart of Slovenia’s attempt to build long-term care around the individual rather than around a predetermined service package. The wider reform is explored through the Slovenia Ageing, Long-Term Care & Community Support Knowledge Hub. Its significance for person-centred care is that national entitlement establishes a level of support, while the practical organisation of that support is intended to reflect the person’s circumstances, choices and changing needs.

Slovenia’s Long-Term Care Act, ZDOsk-1, created a common assessment route and five long-term care categories while offering different ways of exercising the resulting entitlement. Depending on eligibility and circumstances, these include long-term care at home, institutional long-term care, a caregiver of a family member, day long-term care or a cash benefit. E-care and services for strengthening and maintaining independence complement relevant principal rights.

The architecture is important, but person-centredness is ultimately tested after the administrative decision has been issued. It depends on whether the person can make a meaningful choice, whether a suitable provider has capacity, whether the personal plan reflects daily priorities, whether support can change without unnecessary bureaucracy and whether professional judgement remains focused on outcomes rather than simply completing allocated hours.

That makes Slovenia’s current implementation phase particularly important. On 18 September 2026, temporary legislation was adopted to make long-term care delivery more flexible and reduce administrative burdens. Among its changes are simpler adjustments to personal plans and removal of the separate recommended-services plan. These measures are operational reforms, but they also raise a larger question: can greater flexibility make long-term care genuinely more responsive to the person?

A national entitlement creates the framework, not the individual life

Slovenia’s assessment model provides consistency by examining a person’s level of independence across eight areas, including mobility, cognitive and communication abilities, behaviour and mental health, self-care, management of illness and treatment, everyday life and social contact, activities outside the home and household tasks.

The assessment places eligible people into one of five long-term care categories. That categorisation matters because it determines the extent of the entitlement. It is intended to ensure that people with comparable levels of need receive comparable rights regardless of where they live or their socioeconomic position.

Standardisation is necessary for equity, but it cannot by itself create personalised care.

A category describes an assessed level of dependency. It does not explain what gives somebody’s day meaning, which relationships matter most, which tasks they want to continue performing themselves or what trade-offs they are prepared to make between independence and risk.

This is why the distinction between entitlement and delivery matters. The state needs a sufficiently consistent method for deciding who qualifies and at what level. The individual needs sufficient flexibility within that framework for support to fit their actual life.

The strongest form of support tailored to the individual therefore begins with the entitlement but does not end there. It asks how the available resource can be used to preserve capability, routines, relationships and control rather than treating everyone in the same category as though they were interchangeable.

Choice begins with the form of long-term care

Once a Centre for Social Work has determined eligibility and assigned the person to a category, the individual chooses which available long-term care right they wish to exercise. This creates an important element of control at system level.

For one person, remaining at home with formal long-term care may be the priority. Another may prefer support from an eligible family caregiver. Someone else may choose the cash benefit and organise care through their own informal network. Institutional care may provide the security, social contact and continuous support that another individual needs.

These are materially different ways of living, not simply different reimbursement mechanisms.

Meaningful choice therefore requires more than the legal existence of alternatives. People need understandable information about what each option means, what other services can be combined with it, what financial responsibilities remain and what happens if their preferred arrangement cannot immediately be provided.

Choice also changes over time. A person who strongly prefers home care at 75 may reach a point at 83 when an institution feels more appropriate. A family caregiver may initially manage intensive support but later need a different arrangement. Someone receiving a cash benefit may decide that coordinating informal care has become too difficult.

Person-centred systems make changing a legitimate choice possible without presenting it as failure.

This principle aligns with wider approaches to choice and control: people should influence not only the detail of a service but, within the legal framework, the form through which support enters their lives.

The personal plan is where entitlement becomes everyday support

For people receiving services from a long-term care provider, the personal plan is the central operational instrument connecting the formal decision with delivery.

After receiving their entitlement decision, the beneficiary contacts a chosen provider that is able to deliver the relevant form of long-term care. The provider’s long-term care coordinator then works with the person to establish the personal plan. The coordinator is a qualified professional from specified health, social-welfare, social-gerontology or kinesiology backgrounds and has an ongoing role in coordinating and monitoring care.

The personal plan is therefore more than a schedule. It establishes how the provider will deliver the person’s long-term care entitlement.

For person-centred practice, its value lies in translating an abstract volume of support into an arrangement that works in ordinary life. That means discussing not simply what assistance is technically available, but when it matters, what the person can still do, where support would make the greatest difference and how formal services interact with family, healthcare and community life.

Consider a 78-year-old woman in Ljubljana who has reduced mobility following a stroke but remains cognitively independent. She can prepare a simple breakfast and wants to continue doing so because it is part of her morning routine. She needs more help later with bathing, dressing for appointments and heavier household activities.

A task-centred model could distribute assistance according to what workers find easiest to schedule. A person-centred plan starts somewhere different: what does she want to retain, where is assistance genuinely necessary and how can the available support strengthen rather than replace her capabilities?

The resulting arrangement may deliberately leave some activities to her, even if a worker could complete them more quickly. That is not under-provision when it is safe, chosen and appropriately reviewed. Maintaining independence is itself an outcome.

Organisations exploring similar planning decisions can use the Positive Risk-Taking Planner to structure discussion of independence, benefit, foreseeable risk and proportionate controls. It does not determine Slovenian entitlements or legal decisions, but it can help prevent personalised support from becoming either unnecessarily restrictive or insufficiently considered.

September 2026 changes make flexibility more important

Slovenia’s early implementation experience has already produced changes to the way personal planning operates. The temporary intervention legislation adopted on 18 September 2026 responds to practical difficulties identified by providers, entry points at Centres for Social Work and other stakeholders during the establishment of the system.

One significant change removes the requirement to prepare a separate recommended-services plan as part of the entitlement process. The practical content and organisation of services are instead determined through the personal plan.

The legislation also allows the mix and frequency of services to be adjusted more flexibly within the person’s existing entitlement category, with changes appropriately recorded rather than requiring a formal annex to the personal plan every time.

This is operationally significant for person-centred care.

A person’s underlying category may remain appropriate while their weekly priorities change. Following illness, they may temporarily require greater assistance with personal activities. Later, some of that support may shift towards household tasks or activities that help restore independence. A rigid plan can make services administratively correct but practically unresponsive.

Greater flexibility reduces that risk, but it also increases the importance of governance. If changes become easier, organisations need reliable records showing what changed, why it changed, whether the person agreed and whether the revised arrangement remains within the recognised entitlement.

Flexibility without visibility can produce inconsistency. Flexibility with clear accountability can make support considerably more responsive.

Person-centred care is not the same as giving every requested service

Individualisation has boundaries. Slovenia’s system remains a publicly financed social-security scheme operating through defined eligibility, categories, service types and provider capacity.

A person-centred approach does not mean that every preference automatically creates a funded entitlement. Nor does it require professionals to agree with every requested arrangement where there are significant legal, clinical or safety concerns.

The more useful principle is transparent negotiation.

The person should understand the available entitlement. Professionals should understand what matters to the individual. Where a preferred arrangement cannot be delivered, the reason should be clear and alternatives should be explored rather than allowing the system simply to default to what is easiest operationally.

This becomes particularly important where provider capacity constrains choice. A person may have a formal right but find that the preferred provider cannot immediately deliver it. Slovenia’s arrangements recognise waiting-list situations and include mechanisms intended to protect an already recognised entitlement where a personal plan cannot be concluded because of objective difficulties on the provider side.

The distinction between formal choice and practical access is therefore essential. A person-centred system must measure both.

Independence-focused services can change what long-term care is for

One of the more important features of Slovenia’s reform is the inclusion of services specifically intended to strengthen and maintain independence. These complement the principal long-term care rights and move the system beyond compensating for tasks a person can no longer perform.

The services can include professional input intended to prevent deterioration, psychosocial support, post-diagnostic support for people with dementia and advice about adapting the living environment. Relevant professionals include social workers, occupational therapists, physiotherapists, kinesiologists and social gerontologists.

This changes the operational question from “What must we do for this person?” to “What can this person continue, regain or adapt with the right support?”

That difference is fundamental.

Imagine a 74-year-old man in Kranj whose mobility has declined following repeated falls. His daughter has gradually taken over shopping, cooking and most activity outside the home. Everyone is trying to keep him safe, but his world is becoming smaller.

His long-term care entitlement can address practical assistance. Independence-focused input can examine something different: whether his home environment can be adapted, whether mobility can be strengthened, whether activities can be broken into manageable stages and whether his daughter can support him without automatically taking over every task.

The goal is not to restore a previous level of functioning regardless of prognosis. It is to identify achievable capabilities that matter to him. Being able to make a drink safely, walk to the garden or accompany his daughter to a local shop may have greater personal significance than an abstract functional score.

This is the practical value of strengths-based support. Dependency remains recognised, but care is organised around remaining ability as well as deficit.

For Slovenia, this also has strategic relevance. As population ageing increases long-term care demand, preserving independence where realistically possible can improve quality of life while potentially slowing growth in more intensive support needs. That should not become a mechanism for withholding necessary care. Prevention works only when it complements rather than substitutes for genuine entitlement.

Family involvement should strengthen the person’s voice, not replace it

Families are deeply involved in Slovenian long-term support. Some provide informal help alongside formal services; others become recognised caregivers of family members. Relatives often understand the person’s history, communication and routines better than professionals encountering them for the first time.

That knowledge is valuable, particularly where somebody has dementia, communication difficulties or complex needs.

Yet family involvement creates an important person-centred boundary. The relative’s preference and the individual’s preference are not automatically the same.

Consider an 83-year-old widow in Nova Gorica whose two adult children want her to enter institutional long-term care because they worry about falls. She wants to remain in her apartment. Her assessment establishes significant support needs, but she can express and understand her preferences.

A weak process could treat the children’s concern as decisive because it appears safer. An equally weak response could dismiss their knowledge because the mother has expressed a clear wish.

A stronger process explores both. What is driving the falls? What home-based support is available? Could e-care, environmental adaptation and formal long-term care reduce risk? What would happen overnight? What contingency would apply after another fall or a deterioration in health?

The person’s preference remains central while family evidence informs the plan.

Good involvement of family and advocates therefore requires role clarity. Relatives can contribute knowledge, provide support and raise legitimate concerns without automatically becoming the decision-maker.

The coordinator is pivotal to whether personalisation survives operational pressure

Slovenia’s long-term care coordinator sits at an important junction between entitlement, the individual and provider operations.

The coordinator develops the personal plan with the beneficiary, organises team working, supports the coherence and professional delivery of long-term care, monitors whether provision remains appropriate to the person’s needs and performs additional coordination functions within the statutory framework.

This role gives person-centred care a named professional anchor.

But its effectiveness depends on capacity. A coordinator overloaded with administration may spend less time understanding changing circumstances. A coordinator with weak access to frontline information may hold a formally correct plan that no longer reflects reality. A service that treats coordination as documentation rather than relationship management loses much of the model’s potential.

The September 2026 intervention measures are relevant here because reducing administrative burden is intended to free the system from processes that have proved unnecessarily cumbersome during early implementation.

The stronger opportunity is not simply to process more cases. It is to redirect professional capacity towards meaningful coordination.

That requires information from workers, the individual, family where appropriate and other professionals to reach the coordinator in usable form. It also requires authority to act when the existing arrangement no longer works.

Where care is not being appropriately secured, the coordinator can have a role in triggering reassessment through the entry point. This matters because person-centredness includes recognising when the current model is no longer serving the person safely or effectively.

The Governance Maturity Assessment can help organisations examine comparable questions around responsibility, escalation and decision-making. Used in this context, its value is not as a Slovenian regulatory tool but as a way of testing whether personalised decisions remain visible within organisational governance.

Changing needs require more than an annual view of the person

Long-term care needs rarely remain perfectly stable. Frailty can progress gradually. A fall can change mobility overnight. Dementia may alter communication and daily functioning over months. Rehabilitation can increase independence. The death or illness of a spouse may transform an otherwise sustainable home arrangement.

A category-based system therefore needs mechanisms for both small adjustments and significant reassessment.

Slovenia’s current direction distinguishes these two situations more clearly. Service mix and frequency can be adjusted more flexibly where the existing entitlement category remains appropriate. More substantial changes in dependency may require reassessment through the Centre for Social Work entry point.

That separation is sensible because not every change in daily support should require the entire eligibility process to begin again.

Consider a woman receiving long-term care at home whose rheumatoid condition fluctuates. During a difficult period she needs more assistance with dressing and meal preparation. Six weeks later her functioning improves. If her overall category remains appropriate, the operational response should be capable of adapting without turning every fluctuation into a new administrative determination.

By contrast, if repeated deterioration leaves her consistently unable to manage activities that were previously possible, the question may no longer be how to rearrange the existing package. Her level of entitlement itself may need review.

Person-centred support planning and review therefore depends on distinguishing ordinary flexibility from a material change in need.

Workforce deployment can enable or defeat individualisation

Personal plans are delivered by people. That makes workforce capacity one of the practical limits on personalisation.

A plan may specify support at times that matter to an individual, but a provider still has to construct workable rotas. A person may prefer consistent workers, while sickness and vacancies require substitutions. Somebody in a rural area may want an early visit, but travel distances constrain scheduling.

The issue is not simply whether enough workers exist. Person-centred care requires the right skill mix, continuity, communication and sufficient discretion for workers to respond intelligently rather than delivering every visit as a fixed sequence of tasks.

A home-care worker who knows a person well may notice that they are taking longer to stand, have stopped preparing lunch or seem unusually withdrawn. Continuity turns everyday interaction into useful information.

High turnover weakens that advantage. Each new worker has to relearn preferences, communication styles and routines. For somebody with dementia, repeated unfamiliarity can itself create distress.

Slovenia’s temporary 2026 measures include additional payments for eligible long-term care and home-help workers and temporary flexibility for providers facing recruitment difficulties. These measures respond to implementation pressures and are intended to operate during the system’s stabilisation period rather than constituting a permanent workforce settlement.

Longer-term person-centred care will require workforce resilience and continuity to be considered quality issues, not merely employment indicators.

Organisations can use the Predictive Workforce Risk Module to examine how turnover, vacancies and instability may affect service continuity. It does not establish Slovenian staffing requirements, but it can help translate workforce pressure into visible operational risk.

Technology should expand control rather than standardise people

E-care is now part of Slovenia’s long-term care architecture for eligible people outside institutional provision and can support independence through technology-enabled assistance.

Its person-centred value depends on the problem it is being asked to solve.

For somebody living alone with falls risk, rapid access to assistance may make remaining at home feel possible. For another person, digital support may provide reassurance while reducing unnecessary visits. Someone else may struggle with technology or experience monitoring as intrusive.

Technology should therefore follow the person rather than the reverse.

Imagine an 81-year-old man in a rural municipality who wants to continue living alone after his wife dies. His daughter lives an hour away and worries about emergencies. He is comfortable using a simple alarm but does not want cameras or continuous monitoring in his home.

A person-centred approach does not define the most technologically comprehensive option as automatically superior. It asks what level of support addresses the identified risk while respecting privacy and preference.

The same principle applies to digital care records. Better information sharing can reduce repetition and improve coordination, but systems need to preserve accuracy, access control and meaningful human interpretation.

Providers and system partners examining these issues can use the Digital Transformation Readiness Assessment to consider whether technology, workforce capability and governance are developing together. Digital maturity is useful only when it improves the experience and reliability of care.

Person-centred care must remain possible in institutional settings

Individualisation is sometimes associated primarily with support at home, but it matters just as much when a person enters institutional long-term care.

An institution necessarily operates shared systems: meals, staffing, medication processes, cleaning, night cover and communal space. Efficiency requires some standardisation. The risk is that organisational routines gradually become more powerful than individual preferences.

Person-centred institutional care therefore depends on how much individuality can be preserved within collective provision.

An 89-year-old man moving into a home after increasing frailty may have spent decades waking late, eating a small breakfast and taking an afternoon rest. None of these preferences is clinically exceptional, but institutional routines can unintentionally reshape them.

The question is not whether every routine can be redesigned around every resident. It is whether variation is treated as a normal part of care rather than an inconvenience.

Personal history, preferred routines, relationships, communication, cultural identity, meaningful activity and acceptable risk all matter. So does the person’s ability to change their mind.

This is where person-centred planning for older people has practical force. Moving into an institution changes where care is delivered; it should not erase the individuality of the person receiving it.

Funding design influences how much personalisation is operationally possible

Person-centred care operates inside a financing system. Slovenia’s compulsory long-term care insurance funds recognised long-term care services, with public budget support forming part of the wider financing architecture. Institutional users remain responsible for accommodation and food within the statutory framework, while healthcare and rehabilitation that fall within compulsory health insurance remain separately financed.

The financing distinction matters because the personal plan cannot simply convert public entitlement into unrestricted personal expenditure.

At the same time, overly rigid reimbursement can work against individualisation if providers are rewarded primarily for standardised activity rather than responsive support.

During implementation, Slovenia has used category-related payment arrangements for long-term care providers. The emerging challenge is to maintain financial control while allowing sufficient flexibility for the actual service mix to reflect the person.

This creates a familiar tension in publicly funded long-term care systems. Financial rules need to be standardised enough to ensure fairness, predictability and accountability. Care needs to be flexible enough to reflect human variation.

The answer is not unlimited discretion. It is traceable discretion: clear entitlement, transparent service decisions, accurate records and evidence that the resources attached to the person are producing appropriate support.

That becomes increasingly important if future financing pressures lead to changes in user contributions. Slovenian legislation allows for the possibility of specified co-payments from 2028 if system resources prove insufficient. That is a future statutory possibility rather than a current general co-payment regime for long-term care services, and it should be understood as such.

If financing arrangements change, person-centred governance will need to consider not only system sustainability but also whether additional costs alter people's practical ability to exercise choice.

Good evidence asks whether the person’s life is changing, not only whether care was delivered

Person-centred care is difficult to measure because the outcomes that matter vary between individuals.

For one person, success may mean continuing to live at home. For another, it may mean feeling secure after moving into institutional care. A person with progressive dementia may not become more independent, but maintaining familiar routines and reducing distress can still represent a meaningful outcome.

Service activity remains necessary evidence. Providers need to know what support was delivered, by whom and within what entitlement. Yet counting visits or hours alone cannot show whether care is achieving its purpose.

A stronger evidence model combines operational reliability with personal outcomes. Relevant questions include:

• Is the agreed support actually being delivered with reasonable continuity?
• Does the person feel involved in decisions about their care?
• Are important capabilities being maintained or strengthened where possible?
• Have risks, preferences or family circumstances changed since the plan was agreed?
• Are complaints and feedback influencing the way support is organised?
• Where outcomes are deteriorating, is the cause visible and is review occurring?

This approach connects individual experience with quality data and performance evidence. The objective is not to reduce personal outcomes to a dashboard score, but to ensure that aggregate reporting does not lose sight of what care is accomplishing for people.

The Quality Dashboard Builder can help organisations structure a balanced view of activity, quality, workforce and outcomes. It is not a Slovenian national reporting framework; its relevance lies in helping leaders avoid an assurance model dominated by easily counted activity.

Individual choice has to remain visible when capacity is constrained

One of the hardest tests of person-centred policy occurs when demand exceeds immediately available capacity.

A person may be entitled to long-term care at home but struggle to find a provider with sufficient staff. Another may prefer a particular institutional setting that has no place available. Rural geography can narrow practical choice even where legal rights are nationally consistent.

Under these conditions, there is a danger that person-centredness becomes rhetorical: the individual technically chooses, but only from what the system can currently provide.

Slovenia’s implementation arrangements acknowledge capacity constraints, including waiting-list processes and alternative forms of support in specified circumstances. The September 2026 temporary legislation also protects recognised rights where objective provider-side difficulties prevent a personal plan from being concluded within the normal timeframe.

These protections matter, but system governance needs to go further by making constrained choice measurable.

If large numbers of people choose one form of care but receive another because capacity is unavailable, that is strategic demand intelligence. If the problem is concentrated in particular areas, geography matters. If the principal constraint is workforce rather than physical infrastructure, the investment response should reflect that.

A person-centred system therefore treats unmet preference as information rather than merely closing the case once an alternative has been found.

This links personal experience to demand, capacity and waiting-list management. National entitlement creates the promise; capacity planning determines how consistently that promise can become genuine choice.

Governance should test the gap between the plan and lived experience

The existence of a personal plan does not prove that care is person-centred.

A plan can be detailed and still be ignored. It can accurately describe preferences that operational schedules repeatedly override. It can remain unchanged while the person’s circumstances evolve.

Governance therefore needs to examine implementation rather than documentation alone.

Consider a provider supporting 120 people at home. Internal reviews show that nearly every personal plan is complete and current. On paper, assurance appears strong. Feedback from people receiving services tells a different story: visit times change frequently, workers often arrive without knowing preferences and some individuals repeatedly explain the same routines to unfamiliar staff.

The problem is not primarily the quality of the written plans. It is the provider’s ability to deliver them.

A mature governance response connects several forms of evidence: personal-plan reviews, continuity data, workforce turnover, complaints, missed or late services, user feedback and coordinator observations. If several indicators point in the same direction, the organisation has evidence of a systemic issue rather than isolated dissatisfaction.

This is where quality assurance and governance become part of person-centred practice. Senior oversight should be able to answer not merely whether people have plans, but whether operational conditions allow those plans to shape daily care.

The next stage is to make flexibility equitable

Slovenia has now moved beyond the point at which person-centred long-term care exists only as legislative design. The principal rights have been progressively introduced, providers are delivering within the new framework and implementation experience is already reshaping administrative processes.

The September 2026 intervention measures are particularly revealing. Removing a separate recommended-services plan and making personal-plan adjustments easier recognises that excessive procedure can stand between entitlement and responsive delivery.

The next challenge is to ensure that flexibility does not depend on where someone lives, how assertive their family is or how much capacity their chosen provider happens to possess.

That requires national visibility of variation. Which forms of long-term care are people choosing? How often can that preference be met? Where are waiting lists concentrated? How frequently do personal plans change? Which workforce constraints are limiting individualisation? Are services for maintaining independence reaching the people who could benefit?

Answers to those questions would help distinguish healthy local adaptation from inequitable access.

Person-centredness should therefore become a system characteristic rather than solely a professional value. Assessment, financing, workforce planning, provider capacity, digital infrastructure and quality oversight all influence whether the individual genuinely remains at the centre.

International learning lies in separating entitlement from personalisation without disconnecting them

Slovenia’s model reflects its own social-security institutions, legal framework and service history. Other countries cannot simply reproduce its categories, entry points or insurance arrangements.

Its developing experience nevertheless illustrates a useful principle.

National consistency and individual flexibility do not have to be opposites. A system can use standardised assessment to determine equitable entitlement while allowing the practical expression of that entitlement to be negotiated around the individual.

The difficult part is the interface between the two.

Too much national prescription can make care rigid. Too much local discretion can create unequal access and weak accountability. Slovenia’s use of a nationally determined entitlement combined with provider-level personal planning is one attempt to hold those objectives together.

The September 2026 changes deepen that experiment by moving more of the practical service configuration into the personal plan while simplifying changes within an existing category.

The transferable lesson lies less in the particular mechanism than in the design question it exposes: what should a national system standardise to protect equity, and what should remain flexible so that care can respond to individual lives?

Systems answering that question also need evidence from the people receiving support. Service-user feedback and co-production are particularly valuable because administrative data can show what the system delivered while people themselves reveal whether it worked in the way intended.

Conclusion

Slovenia’s long-term care reform creates a stronger structural basis for person-centred support: nationally recognised entitlements, individual choice between principal forms of care, a personal plan agreed with the provider’s coordinator, independence-focused services and mechanisms for reassessment as needs change. The 2026 move towards simpler and more flexible personal planning potentially strengthens that model by allowing support to respond more quickly without reopening the entire entitlement decision whenever daily priorities change.

Yet personalisation will ultimately be judged outside legislation and administrative systems. It will be visible in whether an older person can preserve a valued routine, whether somebody with a disability can retain control over everyday decisions, whether family involvement strengthens rather than displaces the individual’s voice and whether institutional or home-based services adapt when circumstances change.

The central implementation challenge is to make that flexibility reliable and equitable. Provider capacity, workforce continuity, geography, digital access and financing can all narrow practical choice even when formal rights are clear. Slovenia therefore needs to see the gap between recognised entitlement, preferred support and lived experience as important system evidence.

Person-centred long-term care is not achieved by writing a personal plan. It is achieved when assessment, funding, professional judgement, service organisation and accountability continue to respond to the person after the plan has been written. As Slovenia stabilises its new system, preserving that connection will determine whether care is merely allocated individually or genuinely organised around individual lives.