Abstract:
Employee Assistance Programmes are the various interventions in the workplace, which are aimed at helping employees who are experiencing personal and work-related problems. The purpose of this study was to determine whether there is a need for a structured Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) at Sterkfontein Psychiatric Hospital. In this study, the researcher utilised a quantitative approach due to the nature of the research topic under investigation, which is geared towards the assessment of the needs of employees for an EAP, because she wants to base her knowledge gained on objective measurements of the real world, not on someone's opinion, beliefs or past experiences. The researcher utilised research in this study to explore the need for an EAP programme that might be designed/introduced to solve employee problems. For this study, the researcher opted for a combination of an exploratory-descriptive design, due to the fact that little is know about the phenomenon, group or programme. The researcher used a combination of interval/systematic sampling and random sampling to complement each other in eradicating any bias that has the potential of occurring when applying interval/systematic sampling. To achieve representation and precision in this study, the researcher divided the total population of 525 Sterkfontein employees into five categories according to their departments and attached the actual number of employees in a particular department as reflected in the staff establishment document of Sterkfontein Psychiatric Hospital to the appropriate stratum. The results derived from this endeavour were thus: Management (25), Clinical Staff (45), Administration (44), Nurses (253) and the General Assistants (158). The researcher divided each employee in each respective category by one tenth or 10% in order to know how many respondents from each category could be included in the sample, and added together all the figures derived from such a division to obtain a sample size of 53 respondents for the study. As a result, the researcher came up with the following respondents in five (5) categories of employees: - Management (3), Clinical (5), Administration (4), Nurses (25) and General Assistants (16). The researcher compiled only one questionnaire for all five (5) categories of Sterfontein Psychiatric Hospital employees because EAP recognises that employees start from the CEO to the lowest paid employee in the company and, as such, considers all employees to be equal. The investigation illustrated some limitations in the normal running of the hospital. Most of the respondents had both personal and work-related problems, which impacted negatively on the hospital. There were no mechanisisms in place that were geared towards helping troubled employees or providing skills in handling troubled employees. Hence, from these limitations, it became clear that there is a need for an Employee Assistance Programme at Sterkfontein Psychiatric Hospital.
