Legal & General has welcomed government plans to increase access to treatment for mental health conditions and adopt approaches successfully used by group risk providers.
The announcement has also been applauded by the NHS Confederation, but it warned that it will need resources to develop it correctly and that NHS cuts could have a negative impact.
Coalition proposals centre around an additional £400m to fund psychological therapies that would include Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), counseling for depression and interpersonal psychotherapy access for anyone who needs them.
Diane Buckley, managing director of group protection at Legal & General was pleased to see the government recognising the impact of mental health conditions and noted that the new approaches are similar to those already being used successfully in the private sector.
"We've seen a marked improvement in return to work rates for individuals with stress through early intervention and access to treatments such as CBT," she said.
"In the last five years we've almost doubled the number of people helped back to work within a year of being off with a mental illness. This works well for the employees who return to work more quickly as well as for employers who retain their staff.
"It also reduces costs for the NHS and welfare state," she added.
Steve Shrubb, director at Mental Health Network, urged cooperation with the government to maximise the results but also warned about potential cuts in services elsewhere.
"We know recession is bad for the nation's mental health and we need to ensure mental health services are not disproportionately cut as the NHS looks to make unprecedented savings.
"To make sure this doesn't happen, we are keen to work quickly with the Department of Health (DoH) to make sure mental health services are paid for in the same way physical health is. This will require resources to develop and implement properly," he added.
The No health without mental health strategy aims to put mental health conditions on a par with physical health.
According to the DoH, the strategy commits to beginning to expand provision of psychological therapies to children and young people, older people, people with long-term physical health problems, those with medically unexplained symptoms and those with serious mental illness.
Patients will be able to request a referral through their GP or contact the provider directly for a self-referral consultation.
It said extending psychological therapies to all those with mental health problems will result in one million people recovering from their condition by 2014 and 75,000 people returning to work, education, training or volunteering.
It will also create over £700m of savings to the public sector in healthcare, tax and welfare gains.
