Centre for Mental Health

Centres of excellence

We have selected nine sites to be new Centres of Excellence in supporting people who use mental health services into employment.

Services in Central and North West London, Essex, Shropshire, Somerset, South West London, Sussex, Leeds, Devon and Nottingham have committed to being partners in the programme. They will act as exemplars of how Individual Placement and Support (IPS) can be implemented in localities across England.

This innovative programme will see these areas demonstrate how to base their employment services for people with mental health problems on the evidence of what works best. In each site, the local mental health trust will work with partners in employment services, local authorities and other agencies to offer people effective support to get into paid work. The learning from these sites will be shared with other areas of England.

The Centres of Excellence project is based on a similar scheme developed in the US by Dartmouth Medical School, with the support of Johnson & Johnson. Both are offering their assistance to the project to ensure that we learn from international experience and share our learning with other countries.

For more details, download the information below:

Download background information (204 KB)

For further information on the Centres and contact details, visit the Partner Centres section.

Below you can listen to Bob Grove's overview of IPS and why we are setting up the Centres of Excellence (4:42 mins).

IPS stories

Working Well: about Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust's approach to IPS. Sussex is one of our emerging centres of excellence.

What an Employment Specialist does

Kay Robertson, from Central and North West London NHS Trust's User Employment Programme, talks about what it means to be an Employment Specialist. She covers how she works within the Trust, how clients come to her and how she builds the necessary relationships needed to help clients with mental health problems to get back into work.