Have you ever assessed the performance of your EAP provider, or do you simply rely on an assumption of professionalism?

As we approach the end of the year with its associated Festive Season, it is worth noting that this time of the year presents an uptick in the number of mental health concerns societally.

With this in mind we are encouraging organisations to support their workers and to ensure that their current suite of controls for managing mental health and wellbeing are effective.

Embedded within most risk registers, risk assessments or bow tie analyses for mental health is a reference to an ‘Employee Assistance Program’ (EAP). But do the organisations replying on an EAP to provide an effective mitigation of psychosocial health risks actually check on the quality of the ‘employee assistance’ being provided?

Here are some points to consider when reviewing your current EAP provider (or when you are going to the market to select a new provider).

Accessibility

  • Does the EAP provide after-hours availability? Even if your operation is not 24/7, it can’t be predicted what time of day workers might reach out for help. Statistics offered by the larger EAP providers indicate that the most common timeframe is in the evenings after work.
  • Is it easy for the workers to access the help they need? Usually this is straightforward when the EAP details and numbers are widely communicated, but what happens if this is not the case, and how is access communicated for workers where English is their second language or who do not speak English at all?
  • Does the EAP provide a holistic approach? Workers may need access to a range of different services to support work-related stressors, family-based concerns, grief, and for critical incidents.

Responsiveness

  • What is the time delay between the worker reaching out in their hour of need, and the EAP providing an available Counsellor? A number of providers take a message, assign it to a Counsellor, who then calls and books in a session at the next available timeframe, which may be weeks later. So, what happens in the meantime for a worker in in crisis?
  • Does the EAP provide services to assist following a critical incident? Again, it is no good waiting 2 weeks for this.

Professionalism

  • Does the EAP have the appropriate accreditations, and do their medical professionals hold the appropriate qualifications (for Australia)? Unfortunately, the growth in the industry, and in telehealth services for mental health, has created opportunity for under-qualified and inexperienced counsellors to be retained by EAPs. This has the potential to undermine the whole program. In a related vein, if casual or inexperienced EAP counsellors do not understand your organisation or the operating context, their advice can be inappropriate (for example, it may not be possible for an Air Traffic controller to immediately step away from their operations for a 10 min breather when they are feeling stressed).
  • Will the EAP provider maintain confidentiality? While the organisation may need access to data relating to EAP usage, this needs to be balanced with the need to maintain confidentiality.

Quality of Service

  • Is the service that the EAP provides any good when measured against the experience of the end user? Organisations should be seeking feedback from their workers on the quality of the service their EAP is providing, and whether it’s meeting their workers’ needs. This feedback may need to be facilitated anonymously to maintain confidentiality.
  • An organisation’s EAP should be more than a phone number that gets handed out when someone is not feeling themselves. Today’s EAP providers should be supplying a variety of healthy eating, fitness, mindfulness and wellness information via the mechanisms that suit the worker’s needs best, be they via online videos and webinars or onsite workshops.

While the quality of an EAP’s service comes down to a financial proposition, and it certainly appears that the bigger organisations have the budget to provide a higher standard of service, there is also a need to consider it from the perspective of the effectiveness of the risk control.   If we are relying on the EAP as a control measure for managing the impacts of psychosocial hazards and risks, and for whatever reason it really isn’t working, then what does that do for the overall level of risk?

QRMC recommends that an annual ‘deep dive’ review of the EAP provider should be conducted as part of the regular review of the management of the mental health and wellbeing risks and the effectiveness of their controls.  It is noted that it’s important that an EAP is seen as only one of the controls to manage mental health and wellbeing risks and that the review includes consideration of all potential controls.

Please contact QRMC for more information or assistance in systematising the process of assessing your EAP.