On Monday the Department for Work and Pensions will announce that mental health co-ordinators will be based in Jobcentres. The plans, which will make mental health treatment and particularly cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) central to the fight to get Britain back to work after the recession, will eventually see centres providing CBT set up around the country.
In the medium term, Jobcentre Plus will be encouraged to send unemployed people for CBT without the need for a doctor's referral. Within five years the government wants 250-300 therapy centres set up across the UK.
Sessions of CBT – which encourages people to look for potential solutions rather than the causes of difficulties – are today available to patients referred by their doctor, but the government wants to build on 60 pilot schemes to provide therapy centres in most primary care trusts. Successful pilots have shown that a mix of ages and ethnicity is to be encouraged so centres can offer group therapy with a cross-section of people.
Under the plans, unemployed people would be eligible for eight therapy sessions immediately. Within five years anyone, including people in work, would be allowed to "refer themselves in" for treatment. The move follows years of lobbying by Tony Blair's "happiness tsar", economist Lord Layard. Provision of cognitive behaviour therapy on the NHS was his earlier triumph but Layard has continued to lobby for it to be central to the jobs strategy.
Layard and others were concerned that people with mild depression attributable to unemployment or working difficulties andreferred for CBT by doctors were rarely asked to consider work-related issues. Likewise Jobcentres did not prescribe therapy for those for whom varying degrees of depression were a barrier to work. The former work and pensions secretary, James Purnell, said: "Mild depression doesn't have to be a barrier to work."
No comments:
Post a Comment