We are celebrating Swedish Week between 6 and 12 November
Our wellbeing services county is bilingual: Of Western Uusimaa residents, 12%, or 57,000, speak Swedish as their mother tongue. One in six of our nearly 10,000 employees work mostly in Swedish. Our website provides information on our services in Finnish, Swedish and English.
Our special assignment is to support the development of Swedish-speaking social welfare and healthcare services nationwide (Section 33 of the Act on Organising Healthcare and Social Welfare Services). Read more about developing Swedish-language services.
Effortless Swedish
We encourage our staff to speak Swedish during the Swedish Week. We believe that we will get more satisfied customers if we actively show that we use Swedish. Just by greeting with a "god dag" or by wishing "glad svenska veckan", we can positively influence how the customer experiences the visit.
We will publish the most commonly used phrases in remote and on-site meetings to our employees in Swedish. We will also release a game where you can test your own knowledge of the Swedish language and Finnish-Swedish culture.
We will also carry out a resident survey, of which we will notify you separately. Similarly, we will carry out a personnel survey on how our services are implemented in Swedish. The responses will be used both for internal development of Swedish-language services and for finding possible cooperation areas with other wellbeing services counties.
We want to foster and activate the use of the Swedish language in everyday life in other ways as well. We organise a weekly 30-minute session for our employees, during which we practise speaking Swedish in a relaxed atmosphere. We also have 49 Swedish-language ambassadors whose task is to strengthen a lively bilingual culture and functional bilingual services.
Glad svenska veckan!
Swedish Week always takes place in November in connection with the celebration of Finnish Swedish Heritage Day on 6 November. The week also involves a large number of events. You can find all events by region on the Swedish Week website (Svenskaveckan.fi(external link)).