Employee assistance program for healthcare workers in the post-COVID era: Program development, challenges, and future directions

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic led to an unprecedented need for mental health support for hospital employees. To address these rising needs, members of the Psychiatry Department of Weill Cornell Medicine/NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital created a brief, behavioral skills-based mental health crisis intervention program termed “CopeNYP.” Due to the success of CopeNYP’s treatment model in reducing anxiety and depression, NewYork-Presbyterian adopted and expanded this model as its Employee Assistance Program (EAP). This EAP provides access to short-term counseling for over 38,000 employees and their household members. We describe the transition from a brief intervention to an expanded internal EAP. We report on user characteristics including client demographics and work-related variables. Our program yielded a utilization rate of 4.25% from July 2021 to March 2022. Nurses, administrative staff, and professional and allied health staff were the top three employee groups to utilize the services. The most prevalent presenting problem was Anxiety/Stress. Creating an internal EAP to support healthcare worker needs, including high quality mental health interventions, is feasible. We found that our EAP utilization rates were on par with other internal EAPs. In the era of healthcare burnout, internal EAPs can be beneficial for frontline staff who seeks intervention for mental health and relational issues.

Keywords:

• Workforce mental health
• employee assistance program
• COVID-19
• clinical outcomes
• burnout

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).