Child Welfare in Nova Scotia

Child Welfare in Nova Scotia

Housing Stategy Document

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.