Vocational rehabilitation job coaching based on the Individual Placement and Support model: protocol for a mixed methods implementation study.
Riitta Seppänen-Järvelä, Maarit Karhula, Hennariikka Heinijoki
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This is a protocol for a mixed methods study of Finland's IPS-based job coaching service, with surveys and interviews planned for 2025-2026 across four stakeholder groups.
Key findings
1The study has four aims: client outcomes (employment, job matching, work engagement), service outcomes (timeliness, client-centeredness, effectiveness), implementation outcomes and determinants (acceptability, appropriateness, feasibility, fidelity), and the processes by which job coaching becomes embedded in routine practice.
2The job coaching service being studied is IPS-based but modified for the Finnish vocational rehabilitation context: eligibility is limited to clients whose illness has substantially reduced their ability to work, and the service must be completed within 13 months with a maximum of 95 rehabilitation days.
3Data will be collected from four stakeholder groups (clients, job coaches, workplace supervisors, and Kela rehabilitation claims processors) through electronic surveys and thematic interviews, with collection running from January 2026 to December 2026.
Still to come
How it was done
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What it does not show
The service launched in early 2025, so the number of clients may be lower than expected, which could reduce the number of survey respondents (the authors flag this explicitly). Missing data will be handled by complete case analysis (listwise deletion), which may shrink the usable sample further. The study does not combine data at the individual level, so it cannot link a specific client's characteristics to their specific outcome. The service modifies two IPS fidelity criteria (zero exclusion and ongoing support with no time limit), so findings about this service cannot be read as findings about the IPS model as originally defined.
Declared interests
Kela (the Social Insurance Institution of Finland) funded the study, is the service provider whose job coaching is being studied, and also serves as the ethics committee. The authors state that Kela in its role as service administrator had no involvement in study design, data collection, analysis, interpretation, or manuscript writing.
The easy way to misread this
This is a protocol describing a planned study. It contains no data and no results. The effectiveness claims about IPS in the introduction (employment rates up to twice as high, improved self-esteem and life satisfaction) come from other studies cited by the authors, not from this paper. Do not read this as evidence that the Finnish job coaching service works or that IPS is effective for this specific population.
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