PHE - Corporate - Health and Work Champions

The College of Occupational Therapists (COT) and Public Health England (PHE) share a common aim to close the disability employment gap and support people to remain in work or return to work after illness, injury or disability.

The Health and Work Champions project is a six month pilot project between COT and PHE that will run from November 2016 to approximately March 2017. COT will have to ineterview and train 26 Health and Work Champions by June 2017 .

Work Champions will focus on delivering a national programme about the importance and relevance of asking employment related questions and brief interventions with working age adults. Work Champions will deliver training sessions in their employing organisation to enable other health professionals to ask about employment, offer brief advice and refer on for further employment support when required. Work Champions will also take part in an evaluation of the project. They will work in partnership with COT, PHE, other Work Champions and the project evaluator. The evaluation will consider the impact of the training sessions delivered and impact of taking on the Work Champion role.

The project will support Health and Work Champions based in NHS organisations across England to deliver a standardized training module to healthcare professionals. The training module is designed to support healthcare professionals to understand the link between work and health and the potential benefit of employment for patients, to develop their skills in using work based questions as an assessment of global functionality and develop skills to be able to offer brief advice and refer on where required for more support.

The model of clinical champion peer to peer education cascade is based on a previous successful project by Public Health England, Physical Activity Clinical Champions, which trained 3,500 healthcare professionals over six months to increase their understanding of physical activity in clinical care.

The project