IMRY Mental Health Research Showcase 2026

Event details

Annie Irvine  and Jane Suter from work package 2 of the Support2Work project will be part of the poster session WP 2 IMRY Poster Sept 2026.pdf (PDF , 193kb), their content is titled Support2Work: Emerging qualitative evidence on the impact of Employment Advisers in NHS Talking Therapies.  Whilst Adrián Villaseñor from work package 1 will be delivering a presentation titled: Integrated employment support and psychological therapy: causal evidence on labour market outcomes from England’s NHS Talking Therapies programme

Poster: Support2Work: Emerging qualitative evidence on the impact of Employment Advisers in NHS Talking Therapies

Mental health problems are now one of the most prevalent causes of workplace absence and health-related economic inactivity in the UK. Concerns about economic inactivity fuelled by mental health challenges have seen the Labour government set out plans to both ‘Keep Britain Working’ (improving job retention) and ‘Get Britain Working’ (supporting re-entry to employment). Integrated services and partnership working sit at the centre of these proposals. The evidence base on integrated services suggests positive employment and wellbeing outcomes. However, further research on the mechanisms of service delivery and the experiences of staff and service users is needed to explore how services work, what works well, for whom, and why. This paper will present early qualitative findings from our 3-year mixed-methods evaluation of the impact of the NHS’s Employment Advisers in Talking Therapies initiative. Our NIHR-funded research project (Support2Work) is the first major independent evaluation of the Employment Advisers in Talking Therapies service. In-depth interviews are taking place throughout 2026, with service users, Employment Advisers, and therapists across 12 sites in England. Our qualitative inquiry is uncovering the mechanisms through which Employment Advisers influence service users’ trajectories of absenteeism, presenteeism, and entry/maintaining/return to work.

Abstract:  Integrated employment support and psychological therapy: causal evidence on labour market outcomes from England’s NHS Talking Therapies programme

Mental health conditions represent one of the leading causes of economic inactivity and productivity loss in high-income countries. The labour market consequences are substantial and persistent: individuals with depression or anxiety face significantly lower probability of employment, reduced earnings trajectories, and elevated welfare dependency. Despite this, access to joint psychological treatment and employment support remains constrained, and the extent to which these interventions can meaningfully reverse labour marketpenalties remains a question.

We used a nationally representative dataset linking individual-level NHS Talking Therapies data from 2018 to 2023, Census data, and HMRC Pay-As-You-Earn records from 2014 to 2025. Our study population included working-age adults living in England who started NHSTT treatment between 2018 and 2023. Using Genetic Matching to compare EA and non-EA recipients, we estimated staggered difference-in-differences models across monthly treatment cohorts. Our primary outcomes were monthly employee gross pay and employment status.

Due to government and legal constraints, we cannot provide provisional results in this abstract, but we will be able to present these at the showcase.

This paper provides the first nationally representative causal evaluation of the Employment Adviser (EA) programme within a national mental health intervention. Our study design addresses key limitations of prior work — including small geographic samples, self-reported outcomes, and cross-sectional comparisons — while explicitly accounting for treatment effect heterogeneity arising from variation in the timing of EA referral.