Child Welfare in Nova Scotia
Child Welfare in Nova Scotia
The Department of Community Services provides a range of community-based, prevention-oriented services to children, youth, and their families.
Community Services has 450 staff and supervisory positions directly devoted to child welfare in areas such as:
- Child abuse
- Foster care
- Adoption
- Children in care
The department is taking action to improve child welfare in the province, by:
- Reviewing and meeting response times for child abuse or neglect investigations
- Updating the child protection and foster care manuals for staff
- Reviewing the process for investigations taking more than six weeks.
- Monitoring and reducing the time taken to approve foster families
- Introducing new kinship foster family policies
- Introducing new planning framework for all children in care
- Ensuring contact meetings for children in care are held at required intervals
- Ensuring reviews of foster families meet standards
- Developing an audit plan for foster care
Child Welfare
| 1315 | Total number of children in care |
| 170 | New children brought into permanent care of this province in 2012-13 |
| 876 | Total number of children in permanent care of the province |
| 122 | Total number of adoptions that took place in 2012-13 |
| 700 | Total current number of foster families |
| 22 | Total number of residential facilities |
Child Protection
The number of child protection referrals made to Community Services in 2012-13 was 9935.
These resulted in 6601 child protection investigations.
The outcome was that 1249 child protection cases were opened and 534 children were taken into care.