I have been commissioned by Age Concern England to undertake research into welfare rights advice delivered in healthcare settings or in close partnership with health professionals.

Because of different funding arrangements, the research is being limited to projects in England.

This research is a good opportunity for the advice sector to demonstrate its wider impact as well as to make the case for sustainable funding of such projects and I hope that Rightsnet's users will respond enthusiastically.

If you are involved in such a service, please complete the short mapping survey which you can download from here:
www.neilbateman.co.uk/age%20concern%20research.htm .This web page also contains more details about the research.

Please complete this survey even if project(s) have closed or "failed" - lessons from unsuccessful projects are as important as lessons from successful ones.

Thanks

There are at least 3 or 4 research reports that I uploaded a while back to the policy documents archive on rightsnet Neil. You probably know about them already but maybe worth a look? policy resources.

This has also reminded me of something in the last but one Green Paper, A New Deal for Welfare: Empowering People to Work, that introduced, amongst other things, ESA. That paper also talked about DWP undertaking pilots of employment advisors being located in GP surgeries, yet they seem to have gone quiet on that more recently. Don't know of any pilots that took place?

Good luck with the research.

Thanks Paul, there seems to a lot of information around about the links between health and advice - many funders require a report for short-term projects, so all suggestions and copies of reports and research are welcome so that they can be usefully summarised.

Just a reminder, there's still time to participate in this survey, so please do so if you have a health-based service such as an outlet in a GP's practice or hospital.

It's all here: www.neilbateman.co.uk/age%20concern%20research.htm

Thank you to everyone who has responded so far. I shall shortly be collating the survey forms which have been received, but if anyone is involved in a health-based advice project, please do send back a survey - it's never too late, even if you can only complete a few of the answers on the survey form and the research work will continue until late February.

The surveys show that some great work is being undertaken.

Thank you to everyone who responded to this survey. We are now undertaking fieldwork on this.

We have built up a good picture of what services are out there and what their impact is.

We have identified some consistent themes about what makes welfare rights services in health-settings successful and what leads to failure all of which will be in the report we hope to issue in the spring.