Submission to the Department of Health: Work, health and disability consultation

National Voices is pleased to have the opportunity to respond to the consultation on the new Green Paper on work, health and disability.

We welcome the Government’s commitment to support people with long term conditions and disabilities to stay in, return, or start work where this will benefit their health and wellbeing. There is a positive emphasis throughout the Green Paper on taking a personalised or person-centred approach to both health and employment support, and to better joint working across Government.

In this response, we will focus on a number of concerns that we, and our members, have about what is set out in the Green Paper. We have focused in particular on the chapter on health, providing some reflections and recommendations that fall outside the questions asked, but which are critical to ensuring that support is effective. We also highlight some cross-cutting issues shared by many of our members relating to the rest of the paper.