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Health and Work

  • Group summary: Group summary: Health economists in the Academic Unit of Health Economics collaborate with colleagues within and beyond the University of Leeds on a range of funded projects on health and work using a variety of methods including secondary data analysis, applied econometrics, discrete choice experiments and qualitative interviews with employers, employees and people with lived experience.  If this topic is of interest, please contact Adam Martin or Sarah Kingsbury.

What we do

Since the pandemic, much has been written about rising numbers of working-aged people who are economically inactive (i.e. not employed nor actively seeking work) due to health issues (2.8 million according to the Government’s recent “Get Britain Working” White Paper).  But several important questions remain underexplored:

  • How reliable the ONS statistics underpinning these estimates are (some people appear less willing to participate in labour market surveys nowadays);

  • Whether the rise is primarily due to more people transitioning from employment (or unemployment) to economic inactivity, or because people are remaining economically inactive for longer periods;

  • Why inactivity has risen so quickly among younger workers;

  • Whether the UK’s labour market is doing worse than other countries;

  • What are the longer-term consequences for people’s health and wellbeing;

  • What are the implications for the nation’s finances and healthcare system; 

  • What role do common mental disorders and other comorbidities play; and

  • What the NHS, employers and others ought to do about it.

Projects:

  • Since 2020, our ARISE projects have been funded by the Nuffield Foundation to examine how arthritis affects labour market outcomes (PIs: Adam Martin, Sarah, Kingsbury, Max Henderson).  Current work led by Arthur Juet includes analyses of all 14 UKHLS (Understanding Society) waves using a triple differences design to assess how transitions to economic inactivity due to arthritis affect people’s mental health and wellbeing trajectories. 

  • Richard Mattock, in an ESRC project (PI: Dan Stark), has examined how a cancer diagnosis affects education, work and wellbeing outcomes of younger workers using participants from two prospectively-collected cancer cohort datasets matched with UKHLS participants without cancer. 

  • Katie Spencer (PI) has a Cancer Research UK-funded systematic review project exploring these wider economic costs of cancer to patients, carers and wider society.

  • Postgraduate researchers Amwaj Abugamza and Xiaoxiang Dai are using secondary data to explore relationships between ill-health and employment, and MRes student Rhys Williams is conducting a systematic review of how employment outcomes are captured in health economic evaluations of obesity interventions.

Intervention studies in this area include:

  • NIHR-funded SHINE, with Edward Webb and others, which is working with large companies such as Jaguar Land Rover to investigate the costs and effectiveness of offering their established occupational health programmes to smaller companies in their supply chain, which typically have less developed services. This includes a discrete choice experiment assessing the willingness of such companies to engage and pay for such an arrangement. 

  • NIHR-funded ENHANCE, with Tayamika Zabula and Richard Mattock, is collecting and analysing real-world data from NHSE’s newly piloted Complications from Excess Weight (CEW) clinics for children, a key aim of which is enhance educational and subsequent employment outcomes.

Who we are:

  • Max Henderson
  • Dan Howdon
  • Arthur Juet
  • Sarah Kingsbury
  • Adam Martin
  • Richard Mattock
  • Katie Spencer
  • Martin Stevens
  • Edward Webb
  • Tayamika Zabula

Collaborators include:

  • Louisa Ells, Leeds Beckett University
  • Daniel Stark, Leeds Medical School
  • Eleanor Winpenny, School of Public Health, Imperial College
  • Leeds University Business School
  • London Centre for Health and Work

 

Key publications and outputs:

Mattock R, Martin A, Beckett AE, Lindner OC, Stark D, Taylor RM. 2025. Impact of a cancer diagnosis on educational, employment, health-related quality of life, and social outcomes among young adults: A matched cohort study of 401 cancer survivors aged 15–24 in England. Social Science & Medicine.

Webb EJD, Conaghan PG, Henderson M, Hulme C, Kingsbury SR, Munyombwe T, West R, Martin A. 2024. Long-term health conditions and UK labour market outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic. PLOS One

Abugamza A, Kaskirbayeva D, Charlwood A, Nikolova S, Martin A. 2024. Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on employment and inequalities: a systematic review of international evidence and critical appraisal of statistical methods. Perspectives in Public Health

Henderson M, Martin A, McElvenny D, Relton S, Stevelink S. 2024. Economic inactivity and mental–physical multimorbidity. Occupational Medicine