The impact of Individual Placement and Support on employment, health and social outcomes: quasi-experimental evidence from Aotearoa New Zealand.

Aim: To examine the impact of integrated employment support and mental health treatment (Individual Placement and Support, or "IPS") on Aotearoa New Zealand participants' employment, income, health, education and justice outcomes.
Method: De-identified linked data from the Stats NZ Integrated Data Infrastructure and propensity score matching were used to estimate effects.
Results: In total, 1,659 IPS participants were matched to 1,503 non-participants. Compared with matched non-participants, matched participants were 1.6 times more likely to be in employment at 12 months. Over 3 years, matched IPS participants had more earnings, more time in employment, greater total income and were more likely to gain qualifications. They also had more face-to-face contacts with mental health teams, mental health-related inpatient stays and mental health service crisis contacts than matched non-participants. Effects for Māori were similar in direction and scale to the overall results.
Conclusion: Our results show that people with mental health conditions or problematic substance use who receive employment support made available together with mental health and addiction treatment have more employment, gains in qualifications and more independent income when compared to similar people who do not receive this support. More research is needed to understand differences in engagement with mental health services and effects on participants' health and wellbeing.
Competing Interests: Wilson and Gray are employed by agencies that fund IPS. Lockett is employed by a non-government organisation that is associated with organisations that deliver IPS and IPS implementation support. The study was funded by the Ministry of Social Development. FC received funding from MSD to Katoa Ltd to cover time on this project. KM was paid as an analytical consultant under contract to MSD. SB and DP received funding from MSD to University of Otago to cover time on this project. Disclaimer: These results are not official statistics. They have been created for research purposes from the Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI), which is carefully managed by Stats NZ. For more information about the IDI please visit https://www.stats.govt.nz/integrated-data/. The results are based in part on tax data supplied by Inland Revenue to Stats NZ under the Tax Administration Act 1994 for statistical purposes. Any discussion of data limitations or weaknesses is in the context of using the IDI for statistical purposes and is not related to the data’s ability to support Inland Revenue’s core operational requirements. The views, opinions, findings and recommendations expressed in this report are those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of the Ministry of Social Development, or people involved in the peer review process. Any errors or omissions are our own.
(© PMA.)