Male & Female

Certain models of vocational service have been shown to be effective in establishing persons with mental health problems back into employment. The individual placement and support (IPS) model has the widest evidence base in studies conducted in North America. Evidence from North America has led to an increasing interest in the use of IPS in the UK. Employment is dependent on economic and social factors which are often country specific.

Employment is considered one of the major life areas. An increasing number of individuals with hearing loss are seeking help with occupational problems and need individualized employment supports.

Environmental factors are at the heart of many performance problems after traumatic brain injury (TBI). This vulnerability negatively affects the ability of the patient to generalize treatment gains made in an artificial clinic environment to more naturalistic settings like home and work. It also impacts the rehabilitation professional's ability to predict the performance of a patient in these and other real world settings. Rehabilitation efforts that make patient environmental interactions part of the treatment plan will increase generalization and predictability. Rehabilitation efforts should include data-based definitions of the environment(s) within which each individual can best function. Also important is a focus on the tasks that he or she can perform within those environment(s). When a discharge goal is to return to work, rehabilitation efforts must include: identifying job settings where enabling environments can be established and providing ongoing support to the individual in the job situation should the environment change. More research is needed on the use and benefits of an environmentally focused treatment model.

Individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI), spinal cord injury (SCI), and other neurological disorders often have severe disabilities impacting their ability to return to previous activities and return to work is limited. There is an ongoing need for education and vocational rehabilitation systems to work together to improve outcomes for youth and young adults with disabilities.

The goals of cognitive retraining are to help patients: ameliorate difficulties in cognitive functioning, develop ways to compensate for those problems and improve their awareness and appreciation of how neurobehavioural strengths and difficulties impact and generalize to the home and community. Cognitive training has been viewed as a holistic
milieu-oriented approach for people with brain injuries. However, there is considerable scepticism about the benefits of this approach from both healthcare workers and insurance companies. High quality research is needed to on how the effectiveness of cognitive retraining.

The traditional vocational rehabilitation (TVR) services adopt a step-wise approach which offers pre-vocational training at the beginning of the service. In Hong Kong and mainland China, participants usually undergo a prolonged period of preparation before seeking competitive employment. Rates for competitive employment are usually less than 20%. As TVR is the most common form of vocational rehabilitation in Hong Kong, it was important to local service development to benchmark innovative interventions against standard interventions. IPS is an evidence-based rehabilitation service that includes job development and placement, on-going employment supports, coordination of vocational services with multidisciplinary treatment teams, indefinite services and the opportunity for choice of jobs by participants. PS is less than optimal in clients' maintaining their jobs, with 50% of those employed experiencing job terminations by the six-month follow-up. Over a longer follow-up period, considerably fewer than half of the participants in IPS are working during any single month. In the current study, IPS was amplified by the addition of work-related, social skills training (WSST) together with ongoing supports in the community for aiding generalization of social skills in the workplace following the integrated supported employment (ISE) protocol.

Older people with severe mental illness are frequently assumed to be incapable of returning to work and are not actively recruited to participate in work rehabilitation programs. However, just as healthy older people are working well past traditional retirement age, many older people with schizophrenia want to work. However, very few vocational rehabilitation programs target older clients with psychiatric illness.

There are increasing numbers of middle-aged and older people with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders, most of whom are unemployed. Across all age groups, rates of paid employment among people with these disorders are less than 15%. Yet the potential benefits of employment (e.g., increased income, activity, structure, socialization, and self-esteem) could improve symptoms, everyday functioning, and overall health. Many older people with severe mental illness (SMI) want to work. However, work rehabilitation programs usually do not target older patients, and no published studies have addressed work rehabilitation specifically in middle-aged and older people with SMI.

Indirect costs such as absenteeism and disability pensions make up about 90% of the economic burden of low back pain (LBP).Moreover, total costs of back pain are not normally distributed.A relatively small group of patients with chronic LBP, approximately 10% to 25%, is responsible for about 75% of the economic burden of LBP. The development of effective interventions to prevent chronic work disability is high priority.

Sickness leave is generally considered as a major source of societal costs in Western countries. With the increase in mental workload of the past decades, the fraction of psychological problems related to occupational stress has increased rapidly. These problems are also reported in the literature as emotional distress or stress related disorders.