We know the COVID-19 Pandemic has brought with it many challenges, personally, professionally, and within our community. We want to continue to remind you that our Employee Assistance Program (EAP) is available to our employees, their immediate family, and volunteers to provide free and confidential support.
The support covers a range of work and non-work-related issues including:
- Employee assist
- Career assist
- Nutrition and Lifestyle assist
- Manager assist
- Money assist
- Legal assist
- Family and Conflict assist
You have access to four sessions per issue, except legal assist which is available for two hours per year. In response to COVID-19, the EAP is also now providing additional hours of support, with appointments now available on weekends, and up until 11pm on weekdays and can be accessed by calling 1300 687 327.
Along with the EAP offering, we also have the Call a Psychologist service and the coronavirus employee website. The website provides plenty of practical advice and resources to support you, including links to peer support networks and videos, presentations and prompts. We will continue to host health and wellbeing employee sessions every Thursday. If you can’t attend the session, we do record them and have them uploaded to the website so encourage you to find a time that’s work you to watch them back.
At a recent employee forum we heard from our Employee Assistance Program (EAP) provider who gave us some stats from data they had collected across Australia. It showed 63% of their cases were impacted by isolation, lockdown and COVID.
Of their callers in Victoria, 77% were indicating mental ill health, against an Australian average of 55% so we know Victorians are struggling more than the rest of the country.
Some of the issues they mentioned as being a concern were:
- Self-care is difficult when you are stressed and busy
- Compassion fatigue
- Feelings of overwhelm and guilt
- Ill-equipped to deal with the scale of emotion
- Fear for own health and health of family
- Feeling of powerlessness
- Feeling alone or isolated.
If you are feeling overwhelmed or not coping then we encourage you to use one of the service we have on offer.
Approved by Karen Lowe