Are You An EAP?

The Employee Assistance Professional (EAP) has many roles. One is to provide consultation to the workplace in assisting troubled employees. Another is to provide assistance to the employee experiencing family problems.

Family Effectiveness Training and an evaluation done by an EAP, showed how an EAP can utilize this tool with employees for the development of effective communication. EAP's encounter clients in a number of ways:

• phone consultation
• in-person assessment and referral in a three-session or less model
• brief treatment of six to eight sessions
• trainings and educational seminars in the workplace

EAP's can:

• Suggest Family Effectiveness Training s a self-help parenting resource, similar to parenting classes they might attend and books they might read.
• Use the video itself in the assessment process to demonstrate a "partnership model of communication" and enhance the clinician's ability to demonstrate new communication techniques within that assessment process. (Clients can elect to continue on their own if they find the program beneficial.)
• Develop a lending library for clients who would like to preview Family Effectiveness Training and for clients who would like to continue to use the program on their own. Family Effectiveness Training is a wonderful educative tool for families to utilize when in family therapy.

There is, no doubt, additional creative ways in which EAP's could utilize FET.*

*Review of FET by Mary Ann Legaz, CSW, CEAP