Why welfare advice matters for mental health
Rocio Nava-Ruelas
Welfare advice should be a core part of every mental health service, not an optional extra. This briefing, commissioned by Citizens Advice, finds that welfare advice in inpatient and community mental health is essential to effective care and recovery.
It argues that financial insecurity, debt, unstable housing, and the complexity of the benefits system are not peripheral issues for people with mental health problems – they are all drivers of poor mental health.
Drawing on evidence from three partnerships between NHS mental health services and specialist charities (Citizens Advice and Accommodation Concern), Stability beyond care finds that embedding welfare advisers directly into inpatient wards and community mental health teams can contribute to preventing mental health and welfare crises before they escalate, and ensure that people receive the entitlements and protections they need to recover.
People receiving this welfare advice have shorter hospital stays, fewer readmissions, and are better able to engage in treatment. Embedded welfare advice services also relieve pressure on overstretched NHS staff, enabling mental health practitioners to focus on clinical care.
The briefing calls on the Department of Health and Social Care to provide dedicated funding to NHS mental health services to create embedded welfare advice provision within both community and inpatient services.
It urges NHS England’s forthcoming Modern Service Framework for serious mental illness to make welfare advice available in every neighbourhood mental health service and inpatient unit.
And it calls on integrated care boards in England and health boards in Wales and Scotland to ensure that welfare advice is commissioned at the necessary scale to cover all of the secondary mental health services in their areas, with integrated neighbourhood teams and their equivalents in the devolved nations embedding welfare advice into everyday community mental health care.
