Employment Services

Research shows that individual factors (e.g. diagnosis, age, symptoms, disability status) do not predict successful outcomes in work placements or training. The best indicator of whether someone will do well is their agreement that 'I want to work' and 'I believe I can work'.

Supported Employment:
Individual Placement and Support

Individual Placement and Support (IPS) is a way of doing things differently. In an IPS scheme, people get jobs and are trained and supported while they are working, rather than having the training and support to enable them to get into work.

We have more on Supported Employment and IPS, including video clips and lecture transcripts.

Improving Specialist Disability Employment Services

The Department for Work and Pensions has been consulting the public about Improving Specialist Disability Employment Services. You can read our full response below. We are broadly supportive of the direction outlined in this consultation.

Our areas of concern are:

  • Continuing under-representation of people with mental health problems as beneficiaries of DWP programmes
  • The need to ensure that commissioned services follow the evidence-base
  • The mechanisms for ensuring service quality and public accountability are as yet under-developed
  • The need for much greater involvement of disabled people, and especially people with mental health issues, in the design, delivery and monitoring of services.

Download the full consultation response (88 KB)

Supporting drug and alcohol service users back into work

This paper from 2005 reviews the research evidence for the development of vocational services for people who misuse drugs and alcohol. The review finds that:

  1. Simply treating substance misusers (i.e. enabling them to achieve abstinence) is not sufficient to enable them to get a job. Specialist vocational services are required as part of treatment.
  2. Sheltered work involving specialist placements on below market wages does not lead to people getting real jobs.
  3. Equally, job preparation alone seems only to have any impact for people who have a strong external motivation to get a job.
  4. There are two more promising interventions: a stepped care model and the comprehensive employment supports model (based on IPS), which are outlined in the paper.

Download Supporting drug and alcohol service users back into work (33 KB)

Workplace interventions for people with common mental health problems

This is a review by Bob Grove and Linda Seymour of current evidence on how to reduce absence from work due to common mental health problems. It is published by the British Occupational Health Research Foundation.

The research was carried out by a multidisciplinary working group under the chairmanship of Dr Kit Harling, Director NHS Plus. The review was funded by Bunzl plc, Department of Work and Pensions, Department of Health, Esso, Faculty of Occupational Medicine, FirstAssist, GlaxoSmithKline and Vodafone.

Free copies of the review can be downloaded from the BOHRF site: the full text of the review, the summary for health professionals and the summary for employers & employees.

Employment Retention in Walsall

This was carried out in 2005 by Patience Seebohm and Bob Grove in partnership with Trinova Ltd. It included consultations with clients, referrers and staff, and found a consensus that service delivery is extremely successful, with few areas of concern. There were some internal organisational issues to address.

Download Walsall evaluation report (421 KB)

Open Up: the training and multi-media toolkit

This evaluation of the Mental Health Media anti-discrimination project, Open Up, was carried out by Patience Seebohm in 2003-2004 with service user participants in the project: Janet Betinis, Liz Hambrook, Wendy Mayne, Simon Myers and Rowland Urey. It involved a number of interviews with service users delivering and participating in the project, and found the experience had been extremely positive. There were a few areas which needed to be addressed and some progress was made as the programme developed.

Download Open Up evaluation report (Word, 345 KB)

Job Retention Pilot in Avon & Wiltshire

This evaluation, funded by the Department of Health and Department for Work & Pensions, was carried out by Tina Thomas, Jenny Secker and Bob Grove in 2003.

Semi-structured interviews were used to explore the perspectives and experiences of four stakeholder groups: clients, their employers, their GPs and their JRT case managers. The interview data provided considerable support for the view that a job retention service is a valuable addition to the other services available to people experiencing mental health problems while in employment, particularly in view of the need for early intervention.

Both clients and their GPs believed work to play a significant part in the genesis of mental ill health and both groups spoke of the limitations of other services in relation to employment and mental health issues. These views were also shared by the JRT case managers. Employers acknowledged that they were ill equipped to deal with mental health issues, although most were generally supportive.

Download 'Getting back before Christmas' evaluation report (Word, 409 KB)