King's College London

Individual Placement and Support (IPS) is offered to people in treatment for alcohol and other drug use in England to help them secure paid jobs. It is open to every person in treatment who wants to work, and the support offered is designed to suit them individually. We recently completed a study and produced a report on IPS for the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC). However, the report was too short to make full use of all the study data and important information on what clients said about IPS were missed. Our aim is to now add to our findings by conducting further analyses, using the data we have from clients, to write two new papers that we will publish in journals.

We completed telephone interviews with 48 people in treatment for alcohol and other drugs soon after they joined IPS. We then interviewed 39 of them again after three months, 35 again after six months, and 31 again after twelve months. This resulted in 153 interviews. All interviews were carried out by trained researchers who also had their own experiences of alcohol and other drugs. The interviews were recorded with everyone’s permission, turned into text, and then entered into a computer programme to help with organisation and analyses. The papers we write will look at what people think of IPS, including how it helps them and if it can be improved, and how people who secure a job feel about working.

The two articles will become part of the wider international evidence on employment programmes for people experiencing problems with alcohol and other drugs. So far nobody has published research on how people who are in treatment for alcohol and other drug use feel about IPS. The main audience for the papers will be academics, policy makers and other stakeholders, but we will also write a plain language summary for each paper to open the findings up to others. As the UK Government wants to help people who have problems with alcohol and other drugs into work and to reduce the numbers of people on sickness and welfare benefits, our work will provide new insights into an important policy issue.