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| TX: 20.03.06 - Physiotherapy and Incapacity Benefit PRESENTER: SHEILA MCCLENNON |
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| Downloaded from www.bbc.co.uk/radio4 THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY. MCCLENNON As part of the government's strategy of getting people off incapacity benefit and back to work the Department of Work and Pensions is aiming to get a million people off the benefit over the next 10 years. A number of ideas are being tested across the country and seven pilot schemes called Pathways to Work where physiotherapy is being used as a key tool to help rehabilitate people with pain or physical problems. As well as offering advice and support the projects offer free six week long courses with physiotherapists, as Carolyn Atkinson discovered. ACTUALITY Okay, now some of you you'll just being doing an empty box - two and a half kilos - and for the stronger ones we're going to put some weight in there. THOMAS We've seen 150 patients come through who've all been referred from the condition management programme and have all been on incapacity benefit for between a couple of months and up to 10 years actually with a very big variety of conditions from recent foot injury to longstanding back and neck pain, some neurological and some respiratory conditions as well. ATKINSON Anitra Thomas is the physio in charge at Rehab Works in Basildon. Whilst the biggest group of people receiving incapacity benefit are those with mental health conditions the next group are those with back, neck and other muscular skeletal problems, often caused by injury at work. ACTUALITY If you find that you're a bit weak and you can't control it then you can, instead of resting on your hand, can rest on your forearm. ATKINSON Andy, can I just stop you there. You're just about to do the box exercise, which is actually going to be quite useful for you when you go back to work next week because you're going to be lifting things and moving things around aren't you? ANDY Very much so, it's probably one of the harder exercises I've been doing over the last six weeks. Slow to start with, didn't seem to be much benefit in doing it, very difficult but as you get further on into the programme you can see the difference, you can feel the difference. I put the weights in the box, make sure they're fairly stable in the bottom of the box, and lift them in. And then I remember to push my bum out, bit like a weightlifter really, and that's the way you do it, and then you lift it up, almost chin level, stepping forward and putting it on a shelf. THOMAS We've got Trevor here, who's here because he's got quite a bit of knee pain, and he's also had some back pain. TREVOR Well for 23 years I've done really labour intensive work and had a prolapsed disc in my back, split a cartilage in my left knee and I just carried on working, was a warehouse manager for a textile company, involved lifting heavy rolls of cloth all day and in the end I just had a nervous breakdown. But I've been off three years now. Now though I've been here two weeks I'm looking a lot better. They've taught me that for 23 years I've been lifting wrong, my posture's wrong, so why didn't anyone recommend this earlier, that's what I say. ATKINSON This six week course costs around £1500, the equivalent of about five months incapacity benefit. It's not aimed at people with severe stroke or permanent or degenerative conditions, like paraplegia, multiple sclerosis or motor neurone disease. But physiotherapy and exercise is seen as a key tool for those people who can get better, who without that help could remain on incapacity benefit for many years. ACTUALITY Now we're going to be discussing about the consequences that your pain has on your life and your functioning okay? Now for some people their pain is totally debilitating and for others, whilst their pain is ... THOMAS Education classes run along the themes of cognitive behavioural therapy, so it gives us a chance to talk to the patients in a group environment about some of their thoughts and feelings about their own condition. Sometimes it's important that they start to think differently about their condition, so that they then can do some of the physical stuff more confidently. SHEILA I was a nursery nurse but I can't do the lifting anymore. THOMAS Sheila's here, she suffers with quite a lot of knee pain and she's got arthritis in basically every joint of her body but she's also very interested in getting back into work. SHEILA I want to eventually retrain to do something else like office work or something like that. ATKINSON And how long have you been on incapacity benefit? SHEILA More than 18 months. ATKINSON Were you feeling quite low being off work? SHEILA Oh very depressed, yeah, yeah and the pain was bad but I've learnt to manage the pain now and the exercises do definitely help. ACTUALITY Jean, if you step forward and raise the bar high above your head and pass it to me. Good. And I'm taking it away. Good. And as you're going to receive the bar, get nice and close to me yourself and take it from over ... ATKINSON And you couldn't walk very far could you? SHEILA No my left leg I used to sort of drag it but now I'm actually using that leg to step up. THOMAS Occupational health in the workplace is something that Rehab Works has been doing for a while and the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy is now pushing it as a real priority for our industry because prevention is always going to be better than cure and the sooner we can see these people the more benefit it will give to their lives and the more cost benefit it will be as well. GREEN Each year there are over 280,000 new people who go on to incapacity benefit. About 30% of them are people who've got a physical injury of one sort or another and they are capable of being helped by physiotherapists. ATKINSON Phil Green is the chief executive of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy. Despite supporting the pilots he's worried that if they're rolled out across the country the level of funding will drop and the potential benefits will be lost. GREEN In Parliament it's been pointed out that the funding per head appears to be significantly less for the future than it is with the present pilots. If that is the case that really isn't good enough. But our other issue here is that there is no sign at the moment that we're aware of, of additional investment for early intervention, the kind of early intervention that we've been talking about to prevent people going on incapacity benefit. If you can intervene in the first 10 weeks after an injury the chance of getting back to work are excellent. If in fact you wait for six months then it may take anything up to two years to get people back to work. And the financial argument in all of this is that by early intervention we can save the health service money because it stops short term problems becoming patients with long term problems and save the economy huge amounts of money by preventing people languishing unhelped on incapacity benefit for a very long time. ATKINSON It's now about a week later and I've come to meet Andy Danes as he goes back to work, picking up actually the same job that he was working on before, he's a carpenter. He was literally stopped in his tracks when things went wrong last May and here we are in February now having completed the course and Andy, first day back at work, what's it feeling like? ANDY Good actually. I've got to sort of get my thinking cap back on and once I make a start I'm sure it'll come flooding back. We're fixing up a sheet of ply from a pair of steps and there's no way do I want to fall off these steps because the whole fact of jolting your body would be a tremendous strain where I've had the operation. So I have to make sure things are secure. And we're not just talking about going back to work, we're talking about, yeah, returning back to life. MCCLENNON Andy Danes talking to Carolyn Atkinson. Back to the You and Yours homepage The BBC is not responsible for external websites |
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