NHS

NHS: supporting those furthest from the labour market  

This article first appeared in the HSJ.

NHS trusts and health boards should take the lead in deploying progressive employment interventions at local level, which can be used to leverage employment opportunities towards people who are farthest from the jobs market, write Tom Lloyd Goodwin and David Burch.

Despite the claim that unemployment has now peaked, and reports of record vacancies in some sectors, 1.6 million people face uncertainty in the workplace as the furlough scheme comes to an end in the UK. In this context, increased youth unemployment is predicted to be a painful hangover from Covid-19 in the UK as we undergo wider economic recovery.

The role of the NHS in post-Covid-19 local economic recovery

This article originally appeared in the HSJ

During this pandemic the need to mobilise health service capacity has been a key priority and the need for ongoing NHS readiness remains. However, we should now also start to consider the wider role of health institutions in local economic, and social, recovery and reform.

Covid-19 and the determinants of health

As recent work by CLES, The Democracy Collaborative and the Health Foundation has shown, health institutions are considerable anchor organisations with presence and heft within the local economy.  Anchors can exert sizable influence through their commissioning and purchasing of goods and services, through their workforce and employment capacity, and by creative use of their facilities and land assets. Positive use of these aspects can affect change within the wider economic, social and environmental determinants of health.

We need a generous state forever

For years we have been told that expansive government intervention is not a feasible or desirable solution to our major social, economic and environmental ills.

Yet, the unprecedented government intervention of the last three weeks has turned decades of orthodoxy on its head. The state, maligned for years by successive governments, is back. In this, it has re-assumed its fundamental purpose: to insure us against a life that is, as in Hobbes’ Leviathan, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”