Establishing an Employee Assistance Program at a Tertiary Healthcare Center in a Time of Multiple Crises: The Experience of the American University of Beirut Medical Center

Abstract

Healthcare workers are at an increased risk of occupational stress that can impact the quality of their lives and the care they provide to patients. These risks are further exacerbated in countries of turmoil. Since 2019, Lebanon has been going through a succession of major events, including a popular uprising (2019), a socioeconomic collapse (2019–2021), the COVID-19 pandemic (2020), and the Port of Beirut Explosion (2020). The newly launched Employee Assistance Program (EAP) at the American University of Beirut Medical Center (AUBMC) was designed to address needs of employees in distress starting 2020, through free individual counseling sessions. The active engagement strategy based on supervisor, peer and self-identification, eliminates the need of traditional referrals by a primary care physician and does not require insurance coverage. Sessions are delivered by certified psychologists and are confidential; 56 individual and 5 group sessions were held between 2020 and 2022. The data retrieved from the University Health Services clinics’ annual report shows no significant difference between EAP use and participants’ characteristics. Since organizations in Lebanon lack mental health services in general and EAPs in particular, the new EAP at AUBMC constitutes an innovative technique and a prototype that can be incorporated at other workplaces.

Keywords:

• Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
• Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMIC)
• mental health
• mental injuries
• burnout
• socioeconomic crisis
• COVID-19 pandemic
• healthcare workers
• “cluster-ball” engagement

Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge all the efforts of healthcare providers and psychologists serving the AUB/AUBMC community through the EAP.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

Research reported in this publication was supported by the NIH Fogarty International Center of the National Institutes of Health under award number U2RTW012231.