Individual Placement and Support: Penetration and New Populations

Excerpt

Individual Placement and Support (IPS) began in rural New Hampshire in the early 1990s as an attempt to help people with serious mental disorders find and succeed in competitive employment by combining approaches from assertive community treatment and supported employment (Becker and Drake 1993). An initial quasi-experimental study (Drake et al. 1994), followed by a randomized controlled trial (Drake et al. 1996), validated the model. Over two decades since those initial studies, mental health and employment leaders have refined, studied, and disseminated IPS around the world (Bond et al. 2012; Drake et al. 2012; Mueser et al. 2016). Two dozen randomized controlled studies as well as many other qualitative and quantitative studies have helped not only to validate IPS as an evidence-based practice but also to define target populations, mechanisms, implementation procedures, outcomes, and costs. An international IPS Employment Center now provides education, training, outcome data management, technical assistance, and collaborative research through an extensive learning community, which was started at Dartmouth College by Johnson & Johnson philanthropy and now resides at the Rockville Institute of the Westat Corporation (http://​www.​ipsworks.​org). …