Designing an Employee Assistance Program (EAP) intervention for women and minorities: Lessons from the Rockford EAP study

The purpose of this paper is to describe an enhanced Employee Assistance Program (EAP) intervention implemented through a large, community-based, not- for-profit EAP located in Rockford, Illinois, approximately 90 miles northwest of Chicago. The enhanced intervention builds on the existing EAP services and is designed to effectively reach employees with alcohol-related problems and specifically meet the special needs of women and racial/ethnic minority workers. The intervention components wore developed to address significant gaps in the EAP's standard services for these populations. The intervention components include specialized EAP counselors, in-house training of EAP staff, a standardized alcohol screener, enhanced worksite supervisor training, community linkages, enhanced outreach materials, worksite orientation sessions, targeted outreach seminars, and contracted interpreters. This paper describes the development and implementation phases of our research protocol. Subsequent research will evaluate the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of our intervention.