It’s long been accepted that jobseekers can benefit from having a dedicated caseworker to help them overcome any barriers they may face when it comes to finding work. What’s been recognised more recently is that brief clinical interventions can also be valuable tools, as part of the package of support, to help people starting work or returning to work.
What remains less well understood in the employability sector, where clinical interventions have sometimes been used simply as tick box responses for narrowly defined medical ‘problems’, is the benefit to customers of aligning and even integrating these two strands of support.
These insights are the product of a decade of UK experience in which H2E, now part of The BUSY Group, has delivered occupational health services, physiotherapy, occupational psychology and mental health counselling for community services and employment industry partners that include Shaw Trust, Ingeus, REED in Partnership, Seetec and The Growth Company.
Our experience has taught us that to deliver clinical support that can be effectively integrated into people’s employment journeys, three key approaches are needed on the part of the clinician:
- A holistic perspective which avoids a narrowly medicalised point of view and instead aims to see the whole person and their situation,
- A clear focus on employment as an outcome of the journey,
- An understanding of the employment sector and its commercial and performance imperatives.
To deliver this vision, H2E has built a team of more than forty occupational health doctors and nurses, physiotherapists and mental health practitioners, together with a large group of associates. Our training programmes have been designed by our Lead Clinicians to ensure there is a clear employment focus in all our clinical interventions. This is vital for our one-off and rehabilitative work with customers, but it also applies to services like our Health at Home programmes where anxiety and depression workshops for clients link routinely to the world of work.
There will always be a place for one-off, problem-solving interventions, but the evidence we have amassed over the last ten years, across 50,000 health interventions delivered to welfare to work participants, has demonstrated that the impact on customers is most significant where there is an effective relationship between the clinician and the case worker. An effective relationship is one that shares a focus on work and where both parties subscribe to consistent, two-way feedback channels.
Where these elements of best practice have been brought together, the impact on performance has been significant:
- In the Northwest, where our clinical interventions for Seetec formed an embedded part of the client journey on the DWP Restart programme, return to work rates were over 40 percent.
- Where we undertake a pre work occupational health assessment, 82 percent of our participants record a subsequent positive increase in their life, work and health ratings at their 50-day follow-up.
- 88 percent of clients receiving H2E physiotherapy services as part of their employment journey report an improved clinical outcome after four or more sessions.
- Our overall referral to completion rating of over 90 percent demonstrates hugely positive participant engagement.
As The BUSY Group establishes itself in the UK as a national player delivering local solutions, one of our key employment sector goals is to ensure that clinical interventions such as physiotherapy, occupational health and mental health counselling are incorporated routinely as integral parts of customer journeys in back-to-work programmes. That’s because we are convinced that aligning the work of the caseworker and the clinician will demonstrate once again that the most effective innovations in a rapidly evolving marketplace can sometimes be the simplest ones.