An Employee Assistance Programme or EAP, is a tax-free employee benefit. The UK government currently recommend that organisations make use of EAPs.
In 2002, the Employee Assistance Professional Association (EAPA) commissioned research to assess the effectiveness of counselling through EAPs. The research sample was over 28,000 clients seen by 1,786 practitioners associated with 6 EAPs. The finding are as follows:
- 70% of EAP clients are demonstrably shown to recover or improve following counselling interventions.
- 92% of EAP clients were accepted for treatment in just nine days, on average
- 88% of clients scored above clinical cut-off level, which means similar to NHS out-patients
- 80% of EAP clients were estimated to have completed their counselling intervention
- On average EAP clients attended four treatment sessions – 95% of clients attended six sessions.
What do we think?
I have accessed support and counselling through an EAP provided by the workplace and I feel there are some issues. I do believe EAPs have a place in the response to workplace mental health decline BUT, as with any profit-making organisation, someone has to “pay”.
It is common to find that the number of therapeutic sessions provided by the EAP is limited. This means that those who have more serious conditions may have to be referred for private counselling or the NHS when the number of “paid” sessions have been reached. This could obviously be of concern to an individual who is in need of continued support. Those with less severe symptoms could be left to just get on with it. One person advised me that “the counsellor was trying to convince me on my last session that I was much better when I knew I wasn’t”. I had four sessions as that’s what was provided. Due to having psychotherapy training already I was lucky that this was enough for me to work through my issues.
Some providers offer only a telephone counselling service or a choice of telephone/face to face. Abraham Mehrabian developed a communication model which suggests that only 45% of communication is through voice and literal content. Telephone counselling therefore ignores 55% of our communication through body language. My other bug bear is the debate in the counselling profession about the hourly rate for telephone counsellors. The rate can be as little as £11.50 per hour but the EAP charges the company around £60 per hour. This is not the main focus of professional counsellors.
The benefit to employers is that they are going some way to supporting employees, and in theory keeping staff productive, however simply putting in place an EAP is NOT tackling the root cause of stress at work. It is a responsive measure and not a pro-active one.
A Court of Appeal ruling in 2002 stated that an EAP could protect an employer from employees’ stress claims, but this was clarified in 2007 when judges stated that employers need to do more than simply offer an EAP.
We agree, it’s not enough certainly under the Health & Safety Act to respond to issues. Stress must be prevented where possible and this must be tackled within a wider Health and Wellbeing policy. Not only that it needs to be put into practice and measured for effectiveness. Simply ticking a box is outdated and frankly not cutting it.
