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Social Welfare
At the tertiary level, specialised services, including crisis intervention, are provided for cases of domestic or sexual violence, family crisis or custody dispute.
Services for Children
The SWD provides 3,665 residential places and various welfare services for children and young persons who need care or protection owing to serious family, behavioural or emotional problems. The SWD also works with three NGOs accredited under the Adoption Ordinance to arrange local or overseas adoption for children abandoned by their parents or whose parents are unable to support them.
The SWD also provides day child care services to support parents who cannot take care of their children temporarily for work or other reasons. The SWD and the Education Bureau subsidise some stand-alone Child Care Centres and some Kindergarten-cum-Child Care Centres to provide regular and full-day services. The SWD also funds 434 Occasional Child Care Service places and 1,230 Extended Hours Service places at these centres. The Neighbourhood Support Child Care Project provides at least 720 subsidised places, comprising flexible home-based and centre-based child care services for families in need throughout the territory.
Social Security
The CSSA and SSA schemes form the mainstay of Hong Kong's social security system, supplemented by three accident compensation schemes: the Criminal and Law Enforcement Injuries Compensation (CLEIC) scheme, the Traffic Accident Victims Assistance (TAVA) scheme and Emergency Relief. These schemes are administered by 39 Social Security Field Units and two centralised offices.
The CSSA Scheme
The non-contributory CSSA scheme is means-tested and applicants must satisfy a residence requirement. It provides cash assistance to people suffering from financial hardship to enable them to meet basic needs. At year-end, there were 260,774 CSSA cases involving 394,907 beneficiaries. The scheme's total expenditure in 2013 was $20.1 billion, an increase of 2.2 per cent over the previous year.
The Portable CSSA scheme allows elderly people who have received CSSA continuously for at least one year to continue receiving assistance in Guangdong or Fujian Province if they choose to retire there.
Employment Assistance Programmes
The SWD's Integrated Employment Assistance Programme for Self-reliance (IEAPS) assists able- bodied unemployed CSSA recipients aged 15 to 59 and single parents and child carers on CSSA with their youngest child aged 12 to 14 to find employment and become self-reliant. At year- end, 14,294 CSSA recipients had participated in the IEAPS.
The SSA Scheme
The non-contributory SSA scheme provides elderly people and persons with severe disabilities with cash allowances to meet their special needs. It comprises OALA, OAA, Normal DA and
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