Abstract:

In the Czech Republic, there is no systematic state guaranteed care for young people leaving institutional care facilities which would support their integration into standard adult life. For adolescents, institutional life is highly structured, with secured material needs and a strong focus on completing compulsory education and on career orientation. Institutional care ends its role when its clients come of age and complete their education, and then it becomes their sole responsibility to organize their own lives. The future of clients with major difficulties (personal, social and health-related) is extremely complicated (unemployment, substance abuse, criminal behaviors, etc.).

Post-institutional life of young adults is an issue strongly accentuated by the National Strategy for Children's Rights Protection, whose objective is to reduce criminality, recidivism and other pathological behaviours.

The aims of the study included mapping and characterising various possibilities of folow-up care (support housing programmes – halfway houses, boarding houses and starting houses); specification of possibilities available to young adults upon leaving an institutional care facility (follow-up care, faily care, independent housing) and their status on the labour market; comparing data provided by respondents from institutional care facilities and from social service facilities.

The present study discusses reasearch results obtained through structured interviews with staff and clients of selected Czech institutional care facilities – interviews with psychologists, social workers and ethopedists from different institutions, and interviews with clients who left these facilities in 2013.

Keywords:

Follow-up care, institutional care, adolescents and young adults.