Foreword (May 2024, Health and Welfare Policy Forum)

Abstract

Residential facility care is considered to have a negative impact in the long term on the overall development of children in out-of-home care. Children who require out-of-home care are supposed, in principle, to be placed in family-type care settings. However, as of 2022, 57.3 percent of children in out-of-home care were living in residential facilities, a rate considered far too high by comparison with many other countries. Thus, the government set out in 2022 to pursue the ‘roadmap to deinstitutionalizing out-of-home care’. The Roadmap contains various objectives, key among which are: strengthening the infrastructure for family-type care; enhancing support for the natural families of children in out-of-home care, with a view to facilitating their reunification; and bringing functional changes in and specializing foster care facilities. The government’s move toward deinstitutionalizing out-of-home care is significant in that it represents the first of its kind to be pursued as a national agenda item. With the full-scale implementation of this initiative approaching, now is a time that merits assessments of the issues and discussions on policy options. In the May issue of the Health and Welfare Forum, we look into issues around and the state of affairs with home-based care for children living separated from their families of origin. We present our analysis of family-based care as experienced and perceived by youth who, now on their way to independent living, had spent part of their childhood in foster family settings. We also review the pilot scheme implemented earlier for downsizing of foster care facilities and draw policy implications for improvement. Our discussions extend to issues concerning the deinstitutionalization of adolescents in out-of-home placements, whom the current version of the Roadmap leaves unaddressed, and argue that they should be included, along with children in out-of-home care, in the framework of the Roadmap down the line.