Private contractors provide one quarter of municipal health care and social services

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Local authorities are increasingly paying private contractors to provide municipal social services. The fastest-growing and largest category of purchased services are social and health care services.
      Private service providers - various associations as well as companies - take care of about one quarter of  those services. The present annual growth rate in the use of private contractors for municipal services is about ten percent.
     
Traditionally Finnish municipalities themselves have provided such services through their own institutions and with personnel on the municipal payroll. The new arrangements for providing municipal services sparked plenty of intense debate during the recent municipal election campaign.
      Timo Kietäväinen of the Finnish Association for Local and Regional Authorities emphasises that each individual municipality must decide on the best way to provide services.
      He also warns that if the service market is opened too quickly, multinational companies will find it too easy to take them over, because "Finland does not have enough of these companies".
     
The outsourcing of municipal services to private contractors has been on the increase for a long time, and the rate of growth is more than ten percent a year.
      The municipality of Oulunsalo, located near the northern city of Oulu, was something of a forerunner in the use of private contractors. It first opened its health care services to bids from private service providers in 1997.
      Experts say that the use of private companies to provide municipal services does not mean a privatisation of those services. Even if a municipality hires a company to run a health clinic or a day care centre, for instance, securing the quality and availability of those services remains the legal responsibility of the municipality.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Increased dissatisfaction with availability of municipal services (2.9.2004)

Helsingin Sanomat