Brief Treatment and Crisis Intervention Advance Access originally published online on January 18, 2009
Brief Treatment and Crisis Intervention 2008 8(4):358-369; doi:10.1093/brief-treatment/mhn023
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General Mental Health Practitioners as EAP Network Affiliates: Does EAP Short-Term Counseling Overlap with General Practice Psychotherapy?
From Chestnut Health Systems, Bloomington
Contact author: Research Scientist, Chestnut Health Systems, 1003 Martin Luther King Drive, Bloomington, IL 61701. E-mail: dsharar{at}chestnut.org.
The employee assistance program (EAP) field has identified the skills and knowledge needed to provide EAP as unique from other helping professions. The most prevalent model in the delivery of EAPs is the affiliate network, where EAP vendors contract with a network of independent behavioral health clinicians, or "affiliates," to provide EAP services in a private office to employees and family members. What has not been systematically examined until this study is how affiliates enrolled in EAP networks deliver short-term counseling in the context of EAP. This study examines how affiliates utilize short-term counseling with EAP-specific cases referred to affiliates, as well as how short-term counseling in EAP duplicates or overlaps with "general practice" counseling. A "one-time" survey was created using subject matter experts and deployed over the Internet as a Web-based survey. A "working population" of 3,000 EAP affiliates was used as the sampling frame and a random sample of 400 was drawn, with 222 surveys completed (55% response rate). Findings indicate that there has been significant "leakage" from general practice counseling into EAP, or the degree to which EAP clients receive general practice counseling, in the form of short-term intervention as opposed to traditional EAP-specific services. There is currently not much contrast between EAP work and general practice counseling, and the marginal differences reflect the nuances of benefit design (e.g., number of allowed sessions) and a shift among a segment of respondents toward using solution-focused counseling with EAP clients. Implications of these findings are discussed.
KEY WORDS: employee assistance programs, affiliate networks, short-term counseling