Australia's Disability Employment Services Program: Participant Perspectives on Factors Influencing Access to Work.

Alexandra Devine,Marissa Shields,Rebecca Bentley,Cathy Vaughan,Stefanie Dimov,Anne Kavanagh,Anthony D Lamontagne,Helen Dickinson

doi:10.3390/ijerph182111485

Abstract

Disability employment programs play a key role in supporting people with disability to overcome barriers to finding and maintaining work. Despite significant investment, ongoing reforms to Australia’s Disability Employment Services (DES) are yet to lead to improved outcomes. This paper presents findings from the Improving Disability Employment Study (IDES): a two-wave survey of 197 DES participants that aims to understand their perspectives on factors that influence access to paid work. Analysis of employment status by type of barrier indicates many respondents experience multiple barriers across vocational (lack of qualifications), non-vocational (inaccessible transport) and structural (limited availability of jobs, insufficient resourcing) domains. The odds of gaining work decreased as the number of barriers across all domains increased with each unit of barrier reported (OR 1.22, 95% CI 1.07, 1.38). Unemployed respondents wanted more support from employment programs to navigate the welfare system and suggest suitable work, whereas employed respondents wanted support to maintain work, indicating the need to better tailor service provision according to the needs of job-seekers. Combined with our findings from the participant perspective, improving understanding of these relationships through in-depth analysis and reporting of DES program data would provide better evidence to support current DES reform and improve models of service delivery.

Highlights

Evidence suggests that people with disabilities have greater socio-economic and mental health benefits from paid employment than people without disabilities [1,2,3]
We present an analysis from the Improving Disability Employment Study (IDES): a two-wave survey that aims to understand Disability Employment Services (DES) participant perspectives on factors that influence employment outcomes
Our results demonstrate the cumulative impact of multiple barriers on the ability of DES participants to find and maintain employment: respondents with more barriers were less likely to be in employment at Wave 2

Summary

Introduction

Evidence suggests that people with disabilities have greater socio-economic and mental health benefits from paid employment than people without disabilities [1,2,3]. The negative effects of unemployment (social exclusion, economic disadvantage, poor mental and physical health, housing insecurity) appear to be greater for people with disabilities, potentially due to the existing socio-economic disparities they are often exposed to [2,3,4,5]. Economic arguments highlight that improving employment outcomes for people with disabilities would benefit individuals, families and national-level economic outcomes [6,7]. Australians with disability are more than twice as likely to be unemployed (10% vs 5%), and experience higher levels of under-employment (11% vs 8%) [8,9]

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Results

Discussion

Conclusion