Child welfare in your residential area

Regional child welfare offices serve child welfare clients in four different areas:

Espoon keskus child welfare services
Espoonlahti child welfare services
Leppävaara child welfare services
Matinkylä-Olari and Tapiola child welfare services

The services are for children under the age of 18 and their families. Child welfare work is based on the Child Welfare Act. Work is confidential, and the staff has an obligation to maintain secrecy. The service is free of charge.

Services are provided on the condition that the need for child welfare services has been investigated. The client plan includes the measures of support that are provided to a child. The objective is to improve the child’s situation so that there is no longer a need for services and customership ends.

Examples of the services provided by regional child welfare offices:

- Advice and instruction provided by a social worker and a social instructor: Different forms of support are needed in different life situations. The support of a social instructor often involves work done in the family’s home. It may consist of, for example, conversational therapy and support in various everyday activities.

- Guaranteeing a family’s housing and livelihood as well as financially supporting a child in cooperation with adult social work: Adult social work is responsible for granting the support.

- Support person and support family activities: Support person activities involve visits between the support person and the supported person in the child’s own living environment. The visits include interactive activities or hobbies. The visits last for a couple of hours roughly every one or two weeks. A child supported through support family activities participates in the everyday life of a support family and stays overnight in the support family’s home for one weekend a month, for example.

- Organising care and therapy that support the rehabilitation of children and adolescents in cooperation with various parties: educational guidance and family counselling services; short-term rehabilitative care for a child in open care placement; support and guidance that facilitate learning, such as the services of a school psychologist and counsellor; various therapies and psychiatric care; intoxicant and drug abuse services for children and adolescents.

- Child welfare services may organise family work to support a family if necessary.