More UK workers are choosing EAPs over the NHS for mental health support, according to the Employee Assistance Professionals Association (EAPA UK).
In the past, the NHS was the primary provider of mental health services in the UK, but recent data shows this is changing.
The study titled “Holding it together: UK mental wellbeing and the role of Employee Assistance Programmes”, which surveyed EAPA UK members, found that EAP services are now available to 24.45 million employees across more than 105,000 organisations in the UK.
This represents an increase from just 4.9 million employees at 3,139 organisations in 2003. The data shows that the availability of EAPs has grown significantly in recent years, and employees are taking advantage of the support they offer.
The study also found that between January 2022 and January 2023, an estimated 640,250 employees contacted their EAP for mental health support. Of those employees, 434,250 were offered counselling as a result of concerns over their mental health. These counselling sessions proved to be incredibly valuable, with EAPs delivering more than 1.375 million counselling sessions in total.
These findings suggest that UK employees are increasingly looking to their employers for mental health support, rather than relying solely on the NHS. According to EAPA UK, this shift is an encouraging sign that workplace mental health support is becoming more widely recognized and accepted as an essential component of overall mental health care in the UK.
EAPA UK project lead and immediate past chair Eugene Farrell says: “EAPs are now a hugely valuable resource to employers and employees. Anecdotally, EAP providers know that GPs are increasingly encouraging patients with mental health concerns to contact their EAP if they have one. As the report data shows, this also means EAPs are being treated as a frontline emergency service and involved with complex, long-term cases of mental illness.
EAPA UK chair Karl Bennett says: “EAPs have become a pillar of mental health provision for the UK, providing rapid access to professional support for the majority of the workforce, and delivering value-for-money for employers. The question now is what happens in the next 20 years. How will EAPs continue to take on an ever-increasing mental health role as society’s demands grow?”
Alliance Manchester Business School professor of organisational psychology and health Sir Cary Cooper CBE says: “This is the stage we’ve reached, where figures relating to the mental health of the UK workforce are shocking but also unsurprising. Most worrying about the EAPA UK figures is the number of employees with severe depression, in crisis situations, now having to turn to their EAP.
“It’s critical that the Government, the NHS and other healthcare stakeholders, understand the role the EAP industry has been playing in supporting mental health, providing immediate access to counselling and professional assessment for millions of people every year. So not a matter of an employee benefit affecting the few, but a significant role in dealing with an urgent and long-term issue for society.
“Given the limitations to NHS resources and both the scale and complexity of dealing with people’s mental wellbeing, more thought and discussion is needed around the place of EAPs — including how else they can help. Maybe there’s a need for extensions to EAP services, to ensure there’s provision for longer-term counselling programmes through to recovery.
“The EAP sector has coped this far with the giant swell of demand and more serious cases, through training and recruitment initiatives, more online services and apps. But neither employers nor the UK as a whole can afford to see EAPs become overwhelmed.”
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