Labour has unveiled its plans to reform unemployment support, including £45m of new funding for ICBs to contribute to tackling unemployment, and an expansion of NHS Talking Therapies.
The White Paper published on Wednesday set out how the Government will invest a total of £125m in eight areas across England and Wales, to ‘mobilise local work, health and skills support’.
This includes £45m of funding in three ‘trailblazer areas’, the North East, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire, for ‘NHS accelerators’ to ‘stop people falling out of work completely’ due to ill health.
The Government mentioned ‘fixing the NHS’ to help tackle ‘economic inactivity caused by ill health’ as one of its main focuses in the paper, as a quarter of all people aged 16-64 have a long-term health condition that limits their day-to-day activities.
The document said: ‘In three areas in England, trailblazers will receive a share of £45m for dedicated input from the local NHS Integrated Care System (ICS).
‘They will all have a set of agreed outcomes, shared governance and a commitment to robust evaluation and learning.’
North East and North Cumbria ICB said it will use the funding to place work and health coaches in GP practices to ‘offer advice, coaching and support’ to people when health issues become a barrier to working.
As part of this, NHS staff will use data to identify patients who could benefit from this support, while working with GP practices in the region’s most deprived communities.
The ICB said that this follows two pilots in the region which supported patients waiting for surgery with health and lifestyle advice, and helped almost 2,000 people back to work ‘through one-to-one support’ in County Durham and the Tees Valley.
Sunderland GP Dr Martin Weatherhead, who is also the ICB’s health inequalities clinical lead, said: ‘Every day we see people who want to be at work, but need practical, often non-medical help as well as what a GP can offer.
‘It might be help with anxiety, confidence-building or practical things like how to apply for jobs or manage the return-to-work process sensitively.
‘The results so far have been impressive, with almost one-third of the patients who see an advisor successfully getting back to working life.’
Department for Work and Pensions group director for the North East of England Sue Soroczan said: ‘We are already working with 83 GP practices in the region where we offer holistic support to help patients to take ownership and control of their own journey back towards work.’
Earlier this year, NHS leaders recommended that GP practices should host work coaches and other career advice services to help people get back to work.
Plans for GP surgeries to station job coaches to get unemployed over-50s back to work had also been floated by the previous Government.
The Government paper also committed to continuing to expand access to NHS Talking Therapies for adults with common mental health conditions in England.
This is expected to increase the number of people completing courses of treatment by 384,000 and increase the number of sessions, the document said.
It added: ‘There is extensive literature and studies showing that Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and NHS Talking Therapies more widely have significant positive health impacts, as well as improving employment outcomes.
‘Currently over 90% of NHS Talking Therapy Services in England also provide access to Employment Advisers, with an aspiration that by March 2025 99% of NHS Talking Therapies services in England will offer employment support as part of their service.’
As part of these reforms, the Government also promised to deliver an additional 8,500 new mental health staff and also expand access to Individual Placement and Support (IPS) for severe mental illness, reaching 140,000 more people by 2028/29.
The paper was not clear on the details regarding the Talking Therapies expansion. It did not give any indication of the funding attached or when the extra appointments would be made available. Pulse has asked DHSC and DWP for clarification on these points.
The document also pledged to address ‘key public health issue’s that contribute to worklessness through ‘a range of steps to tackle obesity’, including trials of new treatments.
The collaboration between the government and Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical giant behind weight loss medication tirzepatide, will see plans for an evidence study being conducted in Manchester.
‘This aims to evaluate the effectiveness of tirzepatide on obesity and its impact on obesity-related conditions in a real-world setting, to improve our understanding of how obesity medications can potentially improve health, health inequalities and obesity-related absences,’ the paper added.
A version of this story was first published on our sister title Pulse.
