General Mental Health Practitioners as EAP Affiliates: Do They Make Referrals Beyond the EAP?

Abstract

SUMMARY The Employee Assistance Program (EAP) field has identified the skills and knowledge needed to provide EAPs 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. One of the “core technologies” of EAPs is to refer clients beyond the EAP for ongoing treatment or specialized assistance. What has not been systematically examined until this study is if and when affiliates enrolled in EAP networks make specialized referrals for ongoing care or services. This study examines how affiliates make referrals with EAP specific cases sent to affiliates by EAP vendors. It also addresses how referrals in EAP, as practiced by affiliates, duplicates or overlaps with referrals made in the context of “general practice” counseling or psychotherapy. A “one-time” survey with 34 questions 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. Of the 400 randomly selected potential respondents, 222 surveys were completed and returned resulting in a standard error (SE) of 3.5% and a response rate of 55%. The McNemar nonparametric test was used because the same respondent compared general practice cases to EAP cases. An open-ended question was analyzed through a process of content analysis and the identification of themes. Major threats to validity include the potential for desirability, unavailable information leading to “guessing,” memory problems, and no direct, naturalistic observations. Findings indicate the core concepts of “referral” and “postreferral follow-up” as a distinguishing aspect of EAP are no more apparent in the EAP Affiliate Network model than in the general practice setting.