Rzeczywista liczba dzieci i młodzieży przebywających w instytucjonalnych formach opieki całkowitej w Polsce a wyzwania procesu deinstytucjonalizacji
The actual number of children and young people in institutional care in Poland and the challenges of the deinstitutionalization process

Summary/Abstract: This article was written in response to the need for data on the number of children and young people in residential care institutions in Poland. This is crutial for estimating the scale of necessary actions to be taken in order to transition from institutional foster care to family care provisions (deinstitutionalization). The main problem associated with analyzing the conditions of the deinstitutionalization process and, consequently, its planning in the area of supporting children and young people in Poland, is that children and youngsters located outside the foster care system are entirely ignored, both in professional discourse and in statistics. The author presents the consequences of such an approach, analyzing the number of people aged 0 to 24 placed in residential care institutions in social welfare, education, and public health systems. The analysis indicates a significant underestimation of the scale of institutionalization of children and youth in Poland, which, depending on the adopted criteria for qualifying institutions, ranges from 20% to 35% of all people in 2019 placed outside their families of origin. The lower number of this estimation is determined by the share of children and youth placed in institutions that operate within the foster care system (almost 17,000 people), while the upper limit/number is the total number of people aged 0–24 in all institutional care provision, including, residential care homes or care and treatment institutions, among others (almost 30,000 people).

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