LASSI - Occupational Safety in Child Welfare - Virtual Simulations for Supporting Anticipation and Learning

Professionals working in child welfare often confront violence or the threat of violence in their work. Ensuring safety and anticipating risks is challenging, as the work frequently takes place in homes and home-like environments with children and young people whose lives before entering child welfare services may have been traumatic, and whose trust in adults may be fragile. Child welfare workers often feel unsafe in their work, and it is important to prevent difficult situations from escalating to the point where physical restraint would be required. Appropriate interaction and anticipation skills play a key role in this.

The LASSI – Occupational Safety in Child Welfare – Virtual Simulations Supporting Anticipation and Learning -project will be implemented between May 1, 2026 and April 30, 2028. The main implementer is Tampere University of Applied Sciences (TAMK), with JAMK University of Applied Sciences as a co-implementer. The project identifies factors and phenomena affecting occupational safety in child welfare in collaboration with various partners in the field. These will be used to create new types of training content and materials will be developed for the social sector through virtual simulations that are not bound to time and place.

The primary target group of the project consists of child welfare professionals working in the public, private, and third sectors. Project partners include the wellbeing services counties of Central Finland and Pirkanmaa, different forms of foster care and child protection service providers operating in these regions, the Family Foster Care Association (Perhehoitoliitto), Pesäpuu Association, the Police University College, and the Central Finland Police Department. The partners participate in the project activities by providing expertise, experiential knowledge, and feedback through surveys, workshops, simulation content development, and piloting.

The VR simulations will be scripted in cooperation with partners to meet real needs and will be filmed using professional actors in authentic child welfare environments. In the simulations, the learner, the user, will encounter threatening situations in a realistic setting, including soundscapes that reflect real-life scenarios. These simulations will be used to develop professionals' competencies related to anticipating, preventing, managing, and processing threatening situations in child welfare work. The project also strengthens trauma skills and resilience among child welfare professionals through virtual simulations and peer learning.

In the beginning of the project, the current state of threatening situations and training needs in child welfare will be identified and mapped via questionnaire. We will also conduct workshops to deepen the understanding of the situations identified in the mapping, as well as their prevention, management, and follow-up processing. After this, training content for VR simulations will be developed through workshops where professionals co-create scripts based on the situations identified before. Project´s film and media production experts will script and produce VR simulations of threatening situations using professional actors. Child welfare professionals will test the simulations in workshops and provide feedback on their realism, after which the simulations will be further refined. Once finalized, the project will offer the simulations to partners for testing and provide VR headsets for their staff to use, enabling them to test the simulations and give feedback on the content. As a final goal, a training model for using VR simulations to develop the competencies of child welfare professionals will be created and piloted. 

For more information about the project, please contact:

Päivi Malinen, Project Coordinator, tel. +358 50 502 0077, paivi.malinen(at)jamk.fi 
Minna Vainiontaus, Specialist, tel. +358 50 504 4499, minna.vainiontaus(at)jamk.fi