Helping chronically ill or disabled people into work: what can we learn from international comparative analyses?

Abstract

This project has added to knowledge in five main areas:
It has mapped the range and types of policies and interventions that have been implemented in Canada, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and the UK that may influence
employment chances for chronically ill and disabled people. By doing so it has added to understanding about what has actually been tried in each country and what might be considered in others.
It has refined a typology of the focussed interventions that have been identified, based on the underlying programme logic of the intervention, which aids strategic thinking about national efforts to help chronically ill and disabled people into work.
It has produced systematic reviews of the impact of the focussed interventions on the employment chances of chronically ill and disabled people and demonstrated the use of the typology in helping to interpret the results of the evaluations.
The project’s empirical analyses of individual-level data have identified how chronically ill people from different socio-economic groups have fared in the labour markets of the five countries over the past two decades. It has then tested these findings against hypotheses about the impact of macro-level labour market policies on chronically ill people to provide insights into the influence of the policy context.
The project has contributed to methodological development in evidence synthesis and the evaluation of natural policy experiments. By studying a small number of countries in great depth, we gained greater understanding of the policies and interventions that have been tried in these countries to help chronically ill and disabled people into work, against the backdrop of the wider labour market and macro-economic trends in those countries. We then integrated evidence from the wider policy context into the findings of systematic reviews of effectiveness of interventions, to advance interpretation of the natural policy experiments that have been implemented in these countries.