Hilltop’s Work on Supported Employment for Persons with Mental Health and Substance Use Disorders Presented in Spain

New results generated by a team of UMBC researchers (from The Hilltop Institute, the Department of Public Policy, and MIPAR) recently revealed that persons with serious mental illness (SMI) who also have co-occurring substance use disorders (SUD) appear less likely to use or benefit from programs designed to help them find work and stay employed. Based on careful Maryland Medicaid and public mental health system data exploration from the mid-2000s when “place and train” supported employment (SE) programming efforts were expanded in the state, researchers found that SE uptake rates were on the order of 1.6 to 2.8 percent among those with SMI and SUD, whereas the analogous range was significantly higher at 4.1 to 4.7 percent for those with SMI only. Moreover, among persons receiving SE at some point, follow-up data into the years 2007-2010 indicated that rates of employment for the co-occurring group was only 19 percent compared to 29 percent for the SMI group without SUD. Future work will consider apparent antecedents to these disparities toward the development of strategies to increase SE uptake among persons with SMI and SUD. Additional work will look at uptake correlates and strategies more broadly.

This research was lead by Dr. David Salkever (UMBC Department of Public Policy) with funding support from the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health. Dr. Salkever presented these results at an April 2015 meeting in Barcelona, Spain. Hilltop Senior Research Analyst Michael Abrams, MPH, was a co-investigator on this work, and most of the analytic data set creation took place at Hilltop. For more information about this research, contact mabrams@hilltop.umbc.edu.

Presentation Citation: Salkever, D., Gibbons, B., Abrams, M., & Baier, K. (2015, April 15). Disparities in access to and effectiveness of evidence-based supported employment for persons with co-occurring serious mental illness (SMI) and substance use disorder (SUD): Evidence from a state-wide policy intervention. Fourth International Congress on Dual Disorders. Barcelona, Spain. View the presentation.

May 8, 2015