DWP Work Coaches to go into MH wards

Brilliant post, thanks. Lots of ideas for actually improving people's situations and supporting long term recovery.

Sending benefits advisors to speak to patients on inpatient units doesn't really count as a therapeutic intervention, I'm afraid. What capacity have you had experience of mh wards in? You seem to have some very odd ideas about them. People aren't sitting around chatting about their worries while eating cake

Sending unqualified work coaches into such clinical settings is a continuation of what happened under the Tories.

https://www.benefitsandwork.co.uk/news/mental-health-inpatients-were-ordered-to-attend-work-coach-interviews

To be completely fair it may be more 'carrot' than 'stick' under this government but we'll have to wait and see. They may simply carry on what the last lot did. And if people opposed such things when done by the Tories I'd hope they'd still oppose them when done by Labour.

"Whilst these plans may never be put in place if there is a change of government later this year, incidents such as this demonstrate how disastrous it would be if they are not shelved."

@Catza How is giving people "tips" on how to write a CV (something many will already know) supporting them back to work?

What actually would help would be to return to having a supportive benefits system, so people weren't constantly close to breaking point due to fear and worry about survival. Instead of focusing on benefits assessments they could focus on their health and on recovery.

Also well-funded and good public services, so people could access timely help. Instead of being pushed pillar to post and left to struggle until severe crisis point.

And housing. A major factor in mental (and physical) ill health is bad or insecure housing. And incidentally, shockingly, sometimes people are discharged from mental health wards to homeless accomodation - which absolutely is the opposite of an appropriate environment to recover or jobseek from.

More council housing would help get more people into and to stay in work, much more so than harassing already distressed people. It would also achieve what the government says they want - lower benefit bill. Not only fewer needing sickness benefits, but also fewer needing in-work benefits (to cover the high cost of private renting).

And also, as I keep saying, the focus is on the wrong people. The focus needs to be on employers, not unwell people. Because even when someone's recovered enough to work the problem frequently isn't them not knowing how to get a job. It's employer disability and employment gap discrimination. Unless that's addressed, nothing will change or get better.

You can't both complain about lack of therapeutic intervention and resist the very moves towards improving the therapeutic intervention offer.

I visited a friend in a psych ward and I wonder who they would speak to. There was a woman with deep scars on her neck from trying to cut her throat, another woman shouting and arguing with people no one could see, another woman who regularly urinated on the floor and took off all her clothes before throwing herself on the floor...

Perhaps they should hold careers fairs on the wards and bring in the potential employers.

I have been an inpatient many, many times. These days, people in hospital are very unwell. I'm surprised you have experienced inpatient wards as places for recovery, all the ones I've spent time in (over nearly 30 years) have been noisy, chaotic and difficult to spend time in. I don't recall much in the way of therapeutic interventions, unless you count sitting around a table in the OT room colouring in. People are discharged as soon as is possible - often still significantly ill.

There's room for support for people getting back in to work, but hospital is not the place for it. Like I said, the idea is both cruel and stupid.

When someone is far enough through their recovery that they are planning on returning home, yes it would be. They might need benefits help. They might have a job that they actively want to get back to but need support with when and how. Others may be somewhere in between and had a job that contributed to their breakdown so would be seeking support with alternative employment or training.

Far better to have that support as part of a comprehensive program before discharge than to be turfed out and left to flounder.

YABU to have such a click baity thread title that could scare vulnerable people.

There was a thread on here about a week ago. Someone had a very mentally unwell colleague. It was affecting their work and their colleagues including the OP. Obviously not the fault of the unwell person but a good example of how pressuring people to be in work at all costs isn't always the right approach. In that thread the unwell person wanted to stay in work and didn't want to take sick leave (despite the impact on their colleagues). I couldn't help wondering how much their decision was influenced by the discriminatory attitudes towards people too ill to work.

What a shitty society. People are pushed over the edge - to mental breakdowns, because of lack of timely and good support. NHS, social services, benefits. And housing (a big factor in causing poor mental health). The obvious answer isn't to abuse and harass struggling people even more than is already happening. The answer is to end austerity, which is a false economy and an approach that makes more people more ill.

I bet if there was a return to a supportive benefits system, more council housing, timely access to (good) social care and NHS help, the results re people recovering enough to return to work would be significantly more dramatic than the "dramatic results" apparently found by the trials referred to in the study. Although there'd also need to be, as I said, a way to tackle employer disability and employment gap discrimination.

Have you ever been a patient or worked on a ward? I have and I can tell you that the vast majority of people are either worried about getting back to their previous job after being ill or want to look for work as part of their recovery goal. What support do we have currently for these people? None!
For once, there is actually a move towards filling this gap with someone who is able to offer advice and actual therapeutic intervention and everyone who has no idea about the needs of patients is all up in arms about it. Just because you think people wouldn't want it while they are recovering in a hospital doesn't actually mean your opinion has very much to do with the reality of people's needs. And, dare I say, shows a worrying line of thinking about people with mental health conditions.

I also worked on in patient wards for many years do you seriously think staff are going to allow these work coaches to see speak to patients who are in the grips of psychosis or in a hypomanic episode
These wards can be chaotic at the best of times
The trust I worked had various specialist units for drug / alcohol dependency, rehabilitation etc maybe in those kind of settings where patients are stable andx thinking of the future ,it could be something thst might help some patients

Hahahaha - you really believe this?

MH hospitals are anything but refuge and stress-free environments. It's a holding pen to manage risks. That's all. Very little therapeutic work goes on in hospitals. In large part due to lack of time, staff and therapeutic programmes. The charity organisations that are doing all this amazing work in a community do not have capacity to offer it to everyone. Nor are they advertising their services. Also, this work should not be picked up solely by charities, it should be part of funded statutory package. Peer support workers are also far and few between and there will be one in a team who might have over a 100 patients on their books.
The community work, while amazing, is not something most people will have had a chance to experience and the ward is usually the first place that offer them some sort of a link to better support (if they are lucky).

They can send in as many "work coaches" as they want, it means fuck all if employers don't want to take those MH patients on.

Yeah I agree, labour are now just conservatives under another name.

I belive it is about social manipulation, social engineering. They want to make changes to stop people with mental health issues under only primary care to be able to access the health journey in Universal Credit. So to do the health journey they will have to be also under specialist care and or community care. To do that they have to do what they are doing, social manipulation, which is to appear they are tightening the criteria so much, to even those that are very ill . I doubt they will harm anyone in hospital as it would be a voluntary activity and they can't go around causing people to harm themselves while they are under the care of the hospital . It will just appear that they have tighten the criteria severely, so people will accept the real changes they want to do to everyone else with mental health conditions though. It is going to be tough as specialists etc are not enough and waiting lists will get long if everyone needs specialist input to even get a fit note. But it is the preparing for expecting worse than they are taking away so people later accepts what they really want to take away.

The evidence showing work is better for people’s mental health. I’m sure for some people it is. But for many people it’s absolutely not true. As much as I would love to have a job, I just cannot cope with it, it does not make my mental health better in any way. It makes me sooo much worse when I think about it let alone when I try to do it (I lasted 4 hours last time and that was a very very low stress job, I wouldn’t even be able to push through it’s very much a can’t I need to go right now and then it screws me up for months afterwards), and that is from a relatively even keel and I’m pretty ‘well’ at the moment. Though my well doesn’t even come close to the average persons well, it’s not even visible from their well. And there’s plenty people in between. But it’s not worth risking so many people’s lives, just to ‘prove’ that they can get so many people into work so they can save themselves a few quid in the short term. It is possible it may work for some people, but they need to be really fucking careful, and the only thing they are careful about is saving themselves money.

And people voted for these idiots.

Absolute jokers.

It's like the minute you engage, they'll probably sanction you as well.

Labour is not the party I was a member of until Kier came in. They're proto-Tories. Even Maggie Thatcher would've thought this was a step too far.

Shockingly out of order.

Ensuring that inpatients don't lose their accommodation while in hospital would be a good start- currently even this seems too challenging for the government.

I'd be interested to see the full information re the "results of getting people into work have been dramatic".

What's definitely dramatic in terms of numbers - and also dramatically shocking, is the number of suicides due to benefit cuts, sanctions, etc. Imo suicide isn't appropriate term in these cases. If someone's pushed over the edge, it's at very least manslaughter.

It also comes across (that quote from the article) as very patronising and ignorant. Do they think nobody with qualifications and experience, including knowledge of how to write a CV, suffers from mental ill health?

And even if someone's recovered enough to be able to work, what good will the CV writing tips be when the major barrier to work is employer disability and employment gap discrimination? Unless the tips are how to lie about reasons for employment gap so the company doesn't think it was due to illness? I assume not, as guessing they're not allowed to encourage people to lie on CVs.

Where's the initiatives aimed at combatting employer disability and employment gap discrimination? Work coaches going in to see HR departments?

But anyway when someone's unwell, if there was a genuine desire to help them back to work then there'd be a supportive benefits system. If people didn't have the additional distress of worrying about financial survival and dealing with benefit assessments, they'd be more able to focus on recovering - so then more chance of eventually being well enough to work again.

Yes, but what will they be doing? As someone who has worked on inpatient wards, the way things are now is that only the most acutely unwell are inpatients, and as soon as they are anywhere near well enough they are discharged to the community. Having them potentially be part of community teams may be more realistic, but inpatient? It just shows complete lack of insight into the realities of inpatient mental health care as it currently stands.

I take enough issue with mental health professionals going 'computer says no' when it comes to accessing support...

Anyone who sees any merit in this idea is lucky enough to have never been anywhere near a mental health inpatient unit.

And completely disagree with the poster who thinks this is a kinder, different approach to the Tories. No, this is straight out of the "Priti Patel big book of political ideas" Her speciality of being both cruel and stupid, now apparently inspiration for Liz Kendall.

Liz Kendall should just visit a mh ward before she makes pronouncements like this fgs. Awful, clueless woman.