From April 2025, three NHS regional bodies in England will test a new programme—called Health and Growth Accelerators—that aims to get people who are out of work for health reasons back into jobs. The Rose NET evaluation will track whether these Accelerators actually work, by studying how staff deliver the programme, how patients respond, and whether health and employment outcomes improve over time. This matters because economic inactivity linked to ill health is a growing problem in the UK, costing the economy and straining public services. Current approaches often fail to connect healthcare with employment support, leaving a gap that the Accelerators are designed to fill. The evaluation will provide the first rigorous evidence on whether this integrated model can succeed. If the research shows positive results, it could reshape how the NHS and local authorities jointly address health-related unemployment. The findings will directly inform future rounds of the Accelerator programme and similar national initiatives. Even if the programme proves ineffective, the evaluation will prevent wasted public money by steering policy away from approaches that do not work.
View original technical description
Background From April 2025 Health and Growth Accelerators (hereafter ‘Accelerators’) will be implemented in 3 Integrated Care Systems (ICS) to improve health outcomes and rates of economic activity among those who are, or are at risk of, economic inactivity. Rose NET will undertake a comprehensive evaluation of Accelerators to understand implementation, delivery and outcomes, to inform commissioning of later rounds of Accelerators and related initiatives. The overarching research questions are: 1. What are the barriers and enablers to implementation of Accelerators? What are the barriers and enablers to delivery of Accelerators? 2. Can Accelerators (a) identify an eligible cohort (b) recruit and retain into appropriate interventions (c) achieve appropriate outcomes? 3. Do Accelerators demonstrate comparative improvements in health outcomes and rates of economic inactivity? Design and methods We will undertake a multi-method evaluation across all 3 Accelerator sites (and relevant comparators). As Accelerators are a recent policy innovation, aspects of the evaluation remain to be finalised, but the broad structure of the evaluation is as follows: 1. Process evaluation with staff implementing and delivering Accelerators, and patients receiving support from Accelerators. The process evaluation will use qualitative interviews, supplemented by analysis of key documents and logic modelling. 2. Interim outcome assessment. To support decision-making about Accelerators in the short-term, we will undertake an ‘interim outcome assessment’ to explore whether it is plausible that the investment in Accelerators will lead to substantial changes in health and economic activity over the longer term. The protocol for the intermediate outcome assessment is developing based on an evolving understanding of the Accelerators, the patient cohorts and data availability. Depending on these issues, we expect the interim outcome assessment to explore the ability of Accelerators to (a) identify an appropriate patient cohort (b) recruit patients to the interventions in each Accelerator and deliver ‘evidence-based’ support (c) improve outcomes. Analysis is likely to involve an observational quantitative study using routine data collected on the patient cohort and their short-term outcomes. 3. Long-term comparative outcome assessment. The protocol for the long-term comparative assessment is developing based on an evolving understanding of the Accelerators, the patient cohorts and data availability. We expect to undertake two broad approaches to the long-term comparative assessment, using rich data on health and economic activity held by the Office of National Statistics. The first will be a patient-level analysis, assessing the impact of receiving an Accelerator intervention compared to no intervention. This provides the most rigorous assessment of the impact of intervening in this patient group. However, there are aspects of Accelerators that are not interventions delivered to individual patients, but which have wider, system-level effects. and which may impact on health professionals, employers and wider organisations. A site-level analysis will be conducted to capture these wider impacts. Patient and public involvement The Rose NET PPIE Advisory group will provide initial feedback on the developing protocol, and we will mobilise a specific group to support the Accelerator evaluation (with members from the PPIE Advisory group and wider stakeholders to better reflect the Accelerator population). This group will develop a strategy to support all aspects of the evaluation, with a particular focus on patient access to and experience of Accelerator interventions. They are also likely to support development of patient-facing resources and ways to engage participants, as well as helping with the intepretation of data and effective patient engagement. Dissemination We will work closely with NHS-England to support key policy customers within the Accelerator programme, ensuring our research timelines are aligned with key decision-making points in policy development. We will also produce accessible reports for wider dissemination (including Plain Language Summaries), including to the Accelerator sites, as well as a range of formal academic publications.
Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.
Is something wrong? Let us know