Supported employment in the UK
09 June 2010
A study by Dr Louise Howard from the Institute of Psychiatry (IoP), King’s College London (KCL), has recently been published in the British Journal of Psychiatry which compares the effectiveness of Individual Placement and Support (IPS), a supported employment programme for people with severe mental illness, with traditional vocational rehabilitation programmes in the UK, following on from success in the US.
There has been much research into employment as a vital component for our wellbeing so the British researchers aimed to investigate the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of IPS in the UK.
219 adults with severe mental illness were recruited and allocated into two groups, one that received IPS and one that received treatment as usual. One year later, the results found that 13% of those who received IPS were in employment in the open labour market, compared to 7% of those who didn’t received IPS assistance; not a significant difference.
The success of IPS in the US, leading to rates of employment of over 60% in many trials, had led the researchers to expect similar success in this study, and the researchers therefore examined factors that may explain their results. Dr Howard said: 'There are noted ‘disincentives to work’ here, such as the UK benefits systems. It’s known that the degree of these disincentives predicts the success of IPS. This model may therefore be less successful here for a number of reasons including the 'benefits trap' and the extent of deprivation and high rates of unemployment in the general population in the area studied. Another problem could be that the providers of IPS in this study were a separate employment agency and not integrated into mental health teams in quite the way that IPS is delivered in the USA.'
An interview with Dr Louise Howard is available as a podcast in the online version of The British Journal of Psychiatry, while the Wellcome Trust blog includes an interesting entry on the research.
'Supported employment: randomised controlled trial'; authors from the IoP are, Louise M. Howard, Margaret Heslin, Morven Leese, Paul McCrone, Manuela Jarrett and Graham Thornicroft. If you would like to read the study paper in full, please follow the link. Other authors include, Christopher Rice, Terry Spokes and Peter Huxley