A team from the University of Salford are working with a range of health and social care practitioners, including Allied Health Professionals and Psychological Practitioners to encourage a proactive and upstream approach to facilitating ‘work’ or ‘other meaningful occupation’ outcomes early on in routine practice.

So far, a training programme has been delivered for 185 practitioners from the Greater Manchester region as part of the Greater Manchester Public Health Network’s (GMPHN) Work for Health programme.

Mind is calling for all people with mental health problems to be taken off mainstream Government back-to-work schemes and moved onto a specialist programme.

Research from the mental health charity has found that support provided through the Work Programme and Jobcentre Plus is damaging people’s health and making them feel less able to work than when they started. At the same time, these schemes are ineffective for people with mental health problems, as only 5 per cent of people have actually been helped into work.

The government has announced a further £12 million is to be invested in helping people with mental health conditions return to work.

Nearly half (46%) of people claiming Employment and Support Allowance have mental health conditions while mental ill-health is estimated to cost taxpayers and businesses £105 billion a year in health and police services, welfare benefits and sickness absence.

A major international study of workplace health, conducted by Bupa, has revealed the huge potential of employee health and wellbeing initiatives to tackle diseases such as cancer.

The Government has published the fifth and final statutory independent review of the Work Capability Assessment (WCA).

Dr Paul Litchfield, who led the fourth independent review in 2013, was re-appointed to lead the fifth independent review on 6 March 2014. This review sets out a series of recommendations to the government based on the evidence he collected as part of the review, and which complement the recommendations from the first 4 annual reviews.

The UK has so many different programmes for the unemployed, and they seem to change so often that keeping up with them can be a real headache. Meanwhile the things that are effective in helping people back to work remain pretty much the same from year to year.  Here are two new products from VRC’s international collaborations that support  good practice and apply tested methods, irrespective of the programme they are applied in.

A new report sets out the government's progress on improving employment support for disabled people and those with health conditions.

It highlights that:

• 94%* of UK leaders admit mental health prejudice is still an issue in their business
• One in five employees with a mental health condition have felt under pressure to resign.

Mental health prejudice still exists in UK business and those at the top of the country’s largest organisations are not doing enough to tackle the problem according to a new study from Bupa.