NIHR Work and Health – Secondary Impacts of Health Interventions on Workforce Participation and Productivity

Funding for teams to provide work-related economic analyses connected to existing NIHR awards to assess how investments in health and wellbeing have contributed or will contribute to improved workforce participation and productivity.

Established in 2006 and primarily funded by the Department of Health and Social Care, the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) funds health and care research in the UK.

NIHR has launched a new funding opportunity entitled Work and Health – Secondary Impacts of Health Interventions on Workforce Participation and Productivity to fund up to three teams with wide-ranging labour market and economic analysis skills, to provide work-related economic analyses connected to existing awards in the NIHR funded portfolio. This funding opportunity will be commissioned alongside other work carried out by the NIHR Work and Health Research Initiative.

Additional, actionable outputs are required from NIHR’s funded portfolio to answer pressing questions on how investments in health and wellbeing have contributed or will contribute to improved workforce participation and productivity. There are a number of health and care interventions that have been or are currently being evaluated through NIHR funded research that impact the working-age population. NIHR wishes to commission further analyses of this research using econometric and other methods to investigate the effect on participation in paid work at individual, family or household level or in work productivity.

Funded teams will attach to awards in the NIHR funded portfolio, and are expected to produce rapid analyses and modelling focussing on the working age participant population of awards, looking at the effect of an intervention being, or which has been, evaluated by the original NIHR award, on retention or return to work. The whole NIHR funded portfolio is available for potential attachments. Identifying and connecting to relevant NIHR studies will be an important element of the work.

The main research questions to be answered are: 

• What effect does the particular health related intervention have on the probability of people being in paid work?
• What is the durability of these changes over no more than a five-year timeframe (ie what is the longer term impact on retention in, or return to, paid work of the participant group of working age following the intervention)?

The population to be the focus of the research is working age people. The timeframe for modelling retention, attrition or return to work is maximum five years from delivery of the relevant healthcare intervention.

Health conditions that are of particular interest are mental health, musculoskeletal, cardiovascular disease, obesity and respiratory diseases.

The output from each analysis must be applicable to commissioners of services, employers and policy makers, and contribute meaningfully to the body of knowledge to be drawn on by those evidence users. Applicants must demonstrate the feasibility of their proposed approach in respect of producing at least one analysis a year for the duration of the contract.