With the ever changing COVID-19 and the likelihood of more staff working remotely, we are likely to see an increase in anxiety, disconnection and sense of social isolation. We believe that the ability to connect, debrief and talk through what is happening will be critical to people working their way through the coming weeks. It’s important for your staff to know that they are not alone, and that they can access health professional’s in a time that they need.
What is Rapid Response?
Strive can offer your organisation a Rapid Response service, which is in some ways similar to EAP; however there are some subtle differences. These differences are:
- Strive has the technology and capacity to set up a Rapid Response hotline for your organisation (this number would be unique) for you to distribute to your staff who can call Strive directly in a time of need, without requiring a referral from HR.
- Strive would set up an internal case file where any incoming calls from the hotline would be recorded against this case.
- When a staff member calls the Rapid Response hotline, they will be directed to speak with a Psychologist, Rehabilitation Counsellor or Occupational Therapist for support.
- The staff member will be given the option of speaking via telephone or also using videoconferencing services such as Zoom, Skype or FaceTime to assist with face to face connection. It will be the staff members choice.
- The Rapid Response service is a discreet, but not fully confidential service – whereby at the end of the call Strive would notify your organisation only that we received a call from a staff member for x minutes. No names would be provided or details about the staff member or the conversation.
- If the Strive Consultant feels that it might be beneficial to continue working with the staff member, we would ask for consent to speak with your organisation and seek approval for a referral to continue to support the staff member.
- Your organisation would be charged on a needs basis, based on the volume of calls received and total time spent. For example if there was only 5 calls received totalling 1 hour, this is what would be charged.
- We are also from 21 March 2020 going to open our existing Rapid Response service for customers to include weekends, so support will be available 7 days.
We have found in the past around the time of the 2011 floods, and the Townsville floods in 2019, EAP services were not able to keep up with the volume of calls and we wanted to let you know we’re here to assist.
If you would like to know more about how to set up a Rapid Response line for your organisation, please do not hesitate to contact us on 1300 361 953.
Chris and the Strive Team.
