DWP Work Coaches to go into MH wards

[Rinoachicken]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c98y09n8201o

so when you are at you absolute lowest and most unwell (which they are if they are an inpatient as bed are so scare), possibly lacking capacity, lacking cognisance function to understand and retain information, suicidal, psychotic - some tick box Jo, who’s only knowledge of mental health was a half day online course a couple of weeks ago, is going to come along and chat about your CV?!

If you are wanting to support people who are mentally unwell back into work, those acutely unwell in a hospital setting wouldn’t be my first priority - I’d be trying to increase the support AFTER discharge once stable, to those in the community and at primary care level first surely??!!

The DWP should have NO PLACE on a mental health ward imho - where the ONLY considerations and objectives should be stabilising people’s mental health.

And people voted for these idiots.

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.

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.

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

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.

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).

Hahahaha - you really believe this?

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

@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.

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."

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

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

It very much depends what the I mention is. I doubt it is to target those in acute mental crisis. However, a number of patients, after receiving the right treatment (that they couldn't get in the community) will remain in hospital for a while to ensure they become stable before being discharge. It might be good, for these patients, to start considering their path back (or new) to employment before they are left on their own, with the potential to be isolated and see their depression or anxiety resurfacing again.

I expect this intervention would only target a limited number of patients.

Newspapers only share information for the purpose of sensationalism. Let's look at it from a more rounded approach as to why this might be considered beneficial rather than automatically assuming the worse.

Obviously not those people ,as they are unlikely to be able to consent anyway.

Not always while eating cake but certainly plenty of chatting about their worries. Supporting people with wider social issues is very much a therapeutic intervention under the biopsychosocial model of health.
A lot of people on here seem to think that wards consist of people trashing about an peeing on the floor in complete delusion which is a very Victorian idea of mental asylum. The reality is that MH wards are a mixed bag and most disruptive patients are seen in PICU.
And one of the hospitals I worked in had a whole separate therapy building with a sensory room, group room and a kitchen where cakes were baked and consumed by patients. They also had 7 OTs and 4 psychologists per 26 patients which was a real treat. Most hospitals aren't like that but they are no Victorian asylums either and plenty of people need to see a social worker about their benefits while they are there.

Then who? Most people on psych wards are seriously ill or they wouldn't be there.

WTF 🤬 😳

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!
I have posted about my DH before under a different username. He was sectioned as a result of severe depression and psychosis for 8 weeks. This was partly caused by redundancy. He has very recently come home but one of his main worries is that he doesn't know what to do with regards to job searching. He is feeling much better but he would have benefitted I think from having someone to talk through his concerns and options while he was in hospital and feeling better about going into applying to work again. Some people, when they are better ( as seen from the trial at the Maudsley) need to see some kind of pathway back to a normal life. Now what has happened is that he has just been discharged as he is well, he has people scheduled to call him to see how he's getting on at home but regarding the job situation neither of us have any idea, apart from the job centre saying to me when I took in his hospital certificate to sign him off said ' Don't worry we'll get a job coach to speak to him' and that's separate from MH services. Some people will not be capable of accessing the services but I can't believe my DH is the only person who would need or want, maybe near to discharge, to get back to work and suddenly find themselves in an unfamiliar situation as a result of a first mental health situation.