Airing Pain 76: Pain, Poverty and Employment

How to break the links between poverty, pain and unemployment

This edition is funded by a grant from the Moffatt Charitable Trust.

In the second programme in our ‘Good Work’ double bill we hear how people in pain and their families are affected by barriers to employment and support.

Kieran McGhee and his wife Anne-Marie tell how his neuropathic pain and a lack of ongoing support put an end to both his career and hers as she became his full-time carer. Angela O’Neill recalls having to leave the nursing job she loved and her ‘distressing’ experience of a poorly managed back to work scheme.

Staff at the Health and Social Care Alliance set out how the Access to Work programme can help people managing long term conditions to overcome obstacles to getting to and thriving in the workplace. And Jason Leitch of NHS Scotland discusses the Glasgow effect – Scotland’s largest city’s inequalities of health and life expectancy – and how to reduce them.

Issues covered in this programme include: Employment, poverty, financial impact, barriers to the workplace, carers, inequality, access to health services, social care, Glasgow City Mission, community healthcare, funding, welfare, benefits, financial support.

Contributors:

• Professor Jason Leitch, Clinical Director of the Healthcare Quality Unit, NHS Scotland
• Kieran McGhee
• Anne-Marie Kane McGhee
• Angela O’Neill
• Andrew Strong, Policy and Information Manager, the Health and Social Care Alliance Scotland
• Louise Coupland, Health and Employability Manager, the Health and Social Care Alliance Scotland.

More information:

• Health and Social Care Alliance Scotland
• Healthy Working Lives (NHS support for people with long term conditions and their employers)
• Access to Work.