‘Work and health coaches’ will be placed in GP practices as part of Government plans to get more people back to work.
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’ in the North of England 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.’
The three ICBs receiving the funding are:
- North East and North Cumbria ICB
- South Yorkshire ICB
- West Yorkshire ICB
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, and plans for GP surgeries to station job coaches to get unemployed over-50s back to work had also been floated by the previous Government.
And a similar project placing job coaches in GPs surgeries was set up in North London, but campaigners protested against the programme, defined at the time as an ‘intensive and personalised employment coaching pilot scheme’, saying it would threaten the doctor-patient relationship.
Alongside the ‘accelerator’ plans, which are planned to go live for April 2025, NHS England is working with the Office for National Statistics to assess the economic benefits of health interventions including talking therapies, bariatric surgery, treatment for endometriosis, and the NHS Type 2 Diabetes Prevention Programme.
NHSE said that the accelerators present the opportunity to pursue a ‘more radical’ digitalisation of service delivery for MSK and mental health.
For MSK, ICBs will identify and implement ‘suitable’ digital MSK therapeutics, while the digitalisation of Talking Therapies will look at digital tools and therapeutics targeted at specific mental health conditions, such as social anxiety disorder, PTSD, or depression.
NHS England chief executive Amanda Pritchard said: ‘By tackling a rise in health-related economic inactivity and by helping people stay in work or get back to work, the NHS can be a key driver for economic growth in England.
‘Whether it is dedicated employment advisers in back pain clinics, new digital talking therapy tools or providing more support for people to manage their blood pressure or diabetes, the work of these accelerators will be vital in helping us boost peoples’ health whilst also identifying the health interventions that best prevent economic inactivity.’
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.
Nooooo….just no. Keep GP surgery for medical problems to be used by clinicians.
Deja vu.
Unsuccessful last time we had these.
Primary Care needs more funding, so that it can be spaffed on nonsense like this?
IF they try and disguise this as an increase to our funding… what a monumental waste of our time and estates
Inappropriate BS. Not our role, not our job, put them in employment centres/DWP where they should be. Overmedicalisation of literally all aspects of life and overmedicalisation dumped onto GPs. FO
Cue JOB centres immediately telling patients to ‘see your GP’ for help getting back to work!
Its backwards land.
Stop insisting that a MEDICAL service provider on its knees already due to the failure of government to fund all manner of public services is best placed for SOCIAL programs.
And while we’re at it General Practice is NOT a synonym for PRIMARY CARE, nor the NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE. GPs are provider contracted to deliver specifically Primary General (non specialist) MEDICAL (not social) services to the public.
I became a GP to diagnose and MEDICALLY treat those who are ill. Not backfill provision for every allied health or social service outside my curriculum and contract.
Try telling a pilot to think of the passengers’ broader needs and maybe help them check their bags in, navigate security, fuel the plane, stock the drinks trolley, hand out the meals? No. The pilot flies the plane, one plane at a time, and that’s frankly enough to expect regardless of the view of some non-pilot that they should be expected to shoulder responsibility for the broader determinants of the passenger experience.