Supported education in practice - Principles, skills and strategies for developing integrated career-oriented supports for young adults with mental health problems

Education and work are central to young people´s entry into and establishment in adult life.

This is also the case for young adults with mental health problems who face special challenges when it comes to entering the labor market.

Many of these challenges can be overcome with individually tailored, evidence-based services, and yet these have not been widely implemented in Sweden.

Two of these methods are IPS, support for work (Individual Placement and Support) and SEd, support for education (Supported Education).

IPS has good evidence, but a number of studies show that over time the relationship with a labor market that places increasingly high demands on formal qualifications can be fragile.

Research suggests that integrating support for studies in employment-oriented IPS services leads to a more sustainable position on the labor market, and that formal qualifications create opportunities for career development.

The current project, Investing in young adults with mental health problems, (Forte dnr2020-0363) involves seven IPS/SEd services who are working collaboratively with the researchers  to develop the principles and strategies for an integrated service in a Swedish context and to test the effects of this model for a sample of young adult clients.

This includes yearly reviews (fidelity measures) of the implementation of these principles in practice, results which will be anlayzed and reported.

The principles for the integrated model are also being developed with the founders of IPS and we have coordinated with the NBHSW (Socialstyrelsen) who just released a new translation of the employment-related IPS principles to support the development of these prioritized services.

The utilization application would allow us to meet the needs of the many municipalities and regions who have expressed interest in the knowledge being produced by the project.

The aim is to develop a continuing education course for professionals, with accompanying educational materials, which we could make available to these actors, and would have the potential to be self-sustaining after the one-year project ends.

The project would additionally work with the national IPS supervisor network, to formalize their support to new services working to integrate SEd for young adults.

The learning materials for the course and the educational structure for adequately training and initially supervising sites actually implementing these services, would be unique to the utilization project.