[ 26] Action to facilitate access to and uptake of welfare benefits has taken place outside the UK health sector for many years and, more recently, has been introduced within parts of the health service, but its potential to benefit health has not been rigorously evaluated.
We plan to train all frontline staff in child poverty awareness and intervention, including educating households on the uptake of benefits and other key services that offer the vital support and help needed to alleviate the issues associated with poverty.
One concern about the introduction of such incentives is the increased uptake of benefits, which is also referred to as the induced entry effect (e.g. Hoynes and Moffitt 1999).
This paper describes three methodological challenges involved in designing a randomised trial with an equity outcome, and how these were met in a trial of alternative strategies to improving the uptake of benefits of a health insurance scheme among its poorest members.
Then there's the fact that, despite the low uptake of benefits among recent immigrants, politicians and certain newspapers talk constantly of cynical, greedy scroungers, travelling hundreds of miles across the globe purely for a subsistence payment and the chance to experience drizzle.
Community-level behaviour change communication campaigns to inform households may be needed in order to improve knowledge, and to maximise uptake of benefits by those in most need.
Variation in the uptake of benefits might be related to social and geographical factors rather than need [ 28, 29] and these so-called 'supply-side effects' could bias contextual effects away from the null if lower uptake was a feature of less socio-economically deprived neighbourhoods.
Rising unemployment and the associated uptake of social benefits are a further strain.
Survivors of malignancies of bone and connective tissues (SIR: 38.5; 95% CI: 27.5 52.4) and CNS tumours (SIR: 28.3; 95% CI: 23.8 33.6) had the highest risks for late effects and consequently the uptake of attendance benefits (Table 2).
The uptake of basic benefits granted if a person incurs substantial expenses as a result of health problems was 11.0% among the survivors compared with 2.2% in the cancer-free population.
