Individual placement and support in the Netherlands: Past, present, and future directions.

Abstract

Objective: This article addresses the rise of individual placement and support (IPS) within vocational services for people with severe mental illness (SMI), the current state of affairs, and future directions of IPS in the Netherlands. Method: Review of the literature on IPS in the Netherlands, analysis of registration data, and exploration of future avenues for IPS in Dutch mental health care. Findings: In the first decade of this century, an implementation study showed that IPS was feasible in the Netherlands, and a multisite randomized controlled trial (RCT) indicated that IPS was also effective in the Dutch context. Nationwide, from the start of 2016 to the end of 2017, the number of enrolled IPS participants doubled from 1,038 to 2,100, which was largely due to the introduction of preliminary national funding of IPS. Future directions include expanding the IPS practice in terms of target groups, types of providers, goals, and added interventions. Conclusions and Implications for Practice: Involvement of clinicians and the employment opportunities for people with SMI have increased, which is mainly due to the successes of IPS. However, considerable efforts are still needed to make IPS more widely available. Important facilitators are regular meetings of stakeholders in mental health care and vocational rehabilitation, stakeholders' experienced ownership of IPS and collaboration, the mandate and influence of the decision makers involved, and secured IPS funding. Impact and ImplicationsDutch individual placement and support (IPS) practice is growing, with expansion to new populations, the addition of education as a goal, and augmentation of IPS with other interventions such as wellness recovery action planning and cognitive remediation. Efforts to fund IPS from health care and vocational rehabilitation budgets in the Netherlands are progressing toward the goal of achieving adequate, long-term funding for IPS.

International growth of individual placement and support

“…The success of the IPS Learning Community has been an inspiration to IPS advocates outside the USA, modelling effective IPS implementation strategies and the power of peer learning. Furthermore, IPS Employment Center colleagues have fostered international growth by providing encouragement, mentoring and consultation (van Weeghel et al ., 2020).…”

“…In England, the National Health Service committed to ‘doubling access to IPS services by 2021’ (Melleney and Kendall, 2020). In the Netherlands, a broad group of mental health providers, vocational rehabilitation and welfare stakeholders, along with service users and their families, adopted a national action plan for the recovery of people with serious mental illness, emphasising that IPS should be accessible to the entire target population (van Weeghel et al ., 2020).…”

Effectiveness of the Boston University Approach to Psychiatric Rehabilitation in Improving Social Participation in People With Severe Mental Illnesses: A Randomized Controlled Trial

“…However, due to its broad perspective, BPR is not designed to help people to attain goals such as paid employment, which would then require specific expertise it could not support. More specialized methods may be needed for specific goal areas, such as IPS ( 42 ), which is specifically designed to help individuals gain and maintain paid employment and is widely available in the Netherlands ( 43 ).…”

The Active Recovery Triad Model: A New Approach in Dutch Long-Term Mental Health Care

“…Various interventions and rehabilitation approaches designed for people with complex and persistent mental health needs have been described in the literature. Examples are cognitive adaptation training [CAT; (28,29)], individual placement and support [IPS; (30)], the Boston University approach to Psychiatric Rehabilitation (31), and wellness recovery action plan [WRAP; (32)]. In addition, research showed that focus on an expected maximum length of stay encourages people in their recovery and supports long-stay service users to move to a more independent setting (33).…”