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Employee Assistance Program Counseling in the U.S. Transportation Industry: Clinical and Work Outcome Risks and Results for 10,227 Cases at CuraLinc Healthcare

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Attridge, Mark
Pawlowski, David
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2024-03-26
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This applied study explored the role of behavioral health issues in the transportation industry in the United States. The 6.6 million employees in the transportation industry accounted for about 4% of the total workers in the U.S. in year 2024. Workers in the transportation industry are mostly male (74%) and most are of average working age (43 years). The study primarily featured EAP data collected over a 7-year period from employee users of individual counseling or coaching from a single national EAP business in the United States (CuraLinc Healthcare). The larger full sample included 85,432 clients who worked at 2,679 different employers. The EAP user sample for the transportation industry group included 10,227 employee clients who worked at 77 different employers. Longitudinal data at 30-days post use was obtained from 9,063 cases in the full sample including 573 in the transportation industry. The transportation industry EAP client sample was 57% women and 43% men, average age of 41 years, 95% used the EAP for counseling (5% for coaching), 98% were voluntary self-referrals (2% formally referred by their manager at work), 56% meet with a counselor in person at a local clinical office and 44% used online video, and the typical treatment episode lasted about 7 weeks (50 days). The reasons why employees in the transportation industry used the EAP was to address issues of mental health (43%), stress and personal life issues (34%), marriage and family issues (16%), work-related issues (5%) and substance use problems (4%). The EAP user profile for workers in transportation – compared to the 7 other industries – was relatively higher in use of remote online video modality for counseling, but similar on the other EAP use factors. When starting to use the EAP many cases in transportation reported having clinical level symptoms on standardized measures for anxiety disorder (42% at-risk), depression disorder (32% at-risk), alcohol misuse disorder (12% at-risk) and low work productivity (48% at problem level). Among those cases initially at clinical risk status on outcomes in the total sample, over three-fourths recovered to healthy status after use. Among the roughly half of the total cases who initially had a work productivity problem, the hours of lost work productivity per case per month changed from 64 hours to 23 hours. The hours of restored work productivity was estimated to be a $1,413 value per month per case who initially had this problem. Most of these same EAP risk rates and outcome improvement results were also found at similar levels for the other industries. Recent data on number of worker, number of employers, worker age, gender, private/public sector, union representation, compensation, and safety from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics for 7 other industry categories was presented to provide context for this one industry.

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Attridge, M., & Pawlowski, D. (2024). Employee assistance program counseling in the U.S. transportation industry: Clinical and work outcome risks and results for 10,227 cases at CuraLinc Healthcare. International Journal of Scientific and Research Publications, 14(3), 266-276.
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