Municipalities provide service vouchers to residents so they can buy services from private providers. The client gives the vouchers to the service provider who then claims payment from the municipality.
Usually, the vouchers are used to provide social services such as home care services and substitute services for caretakers. Increasingly, service vouchers are also used for healthcare services, such as dental and specialized healthcare and therapy.
The latest full statistics on the use of the vouchers are two years old. At that time 166 local governments had taken the system into use. Officials say that not only has the number of municipalities offering residents this option grown, but the range of services covered has expanded significantly.
Smartum, a company that manages service vouchers and voucher billing and payment for 40 municipalities, confirms that for five years the growth in their use was steady, but moderate. This year the number of client municipalities whose systems it manages has shot up by twenty percent and the types of services available has expended into new areas.
The company's CEO Maarit Hannula told Yle that this year local governments have started offering vouchers for use to pay for residential care for the elderly, child daycare, outpatient therapy for veterans, special treatment for diabetics and children's organized hobbies.
Even though the use of service vouchers is on the rise, they still represent only a fraction of the total of public social and health services contracted from the private sector. According Maarit Hannula, municipalities annually purchase around 2.3 billion euros worth of such services. Vouchers are still used to cover only a few percent of this outlay.