Managed Counselling Referral

We offer an extremely valuable management service, unusual in our industry, which is called a managed counselling referral.

This referral service enables HR and line managers to initiate and manage counselling or psychological referrals for employees.

This means that when one of your employees needs support, you now don’t have to wait or hope that they help themselves through a self referral.

This service is increasingly valuable as approximately half of sickness absence cases are stress-related, presenting non-physical ailments that cannot be addressed by referral to an occupational health (OH) physician.

How managed counselling referrals work

Employers can pro-actively assist struggling individuals, using a system of referral which replicates how HR might work with OH to address a health or medical problem.

Managed counselling referrals aim to integrate employee support with an organisation's sickness and performance management programme. Managers remain in contact with the employees key therapeutic milestones through clinical assessments, regular updates on progress and end-of-therapy reports.

We can offer this service directly to existing customers or to new customers via existing OH provider or as a stand-alone service. This service is charged on a fee-per-referral basis through our solutions-on-request service. 

Managed counselling referral direct

When an employee is experiencing problems, particularly ones which are work-related such as long term absence, struggling with change or behavioural problems, then HR specialists or line management can contact us directly to initiate counselling or psychological support.

This means that your employee can be connected to the right support, in the right place at the right time.

The referring manager is given the option of receiving detailed assessment reports and is kept updated on the employee’s progress at every stage. It is a truly interactive and engaged process and is highly effective in managing cases of stress-related sickness absence.

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When the need for counselling or psychological support is identified through an OH referral, your OH provider or in-house OH team can contact WSM directly, enabling us to carefully select the psychological support service which best fits the needs of your employee.

Through your OH provider, we can offer clinical assessment reports and keep them updated on the employee’s progress at every stage.

WSM leads the market in the provision of high quality and responsive counselling referrals received from OH. This is a specialty of WSM and we work closely with many independent commercial OH providers and with numerous in-house OH teams. Our respective case management teams are fully integrated - enabling us to offer a seamless OH-to-Counselling referral solution to 100’s of employers.

Some employers have an occasional requirement for counselling or other wellbeing solutions, but don’t necessarily want to commit to an Employee Assistance Programme subscription.

Our innovative Solution-on-Request option gives flexibile access to a range of high quality counselling and related services on a simple ad-hoc fee per session basis.

The Solution-on-Request service is an ideal solution for organisations that:

  • Do not currently have an Employee Assistance Programme contract
  • Currently provide OH services (internally or externally) and want to add counselling
  • Subscribe to a basic Employee Assistance Programme and want to enhance the referring options to include Management referral and specialist management support.

The Solutions-on-request service offers a simple, hassle-free administration with no retainer fees. It is risk free as you only incur costs when you use the service.

On a fee-per-session basis, the pricing is transparent with clear statements showing exact sessions specifically ordered. We can offer the following services as Solutions-on-Request:

Deborah Jones, Employee Relations Manager, AG Barr says...
“For us WSM’s Solutions-on-Request works extremely well. We don’t feel the need to offer an EAP that employees can access directly, instead we rely on an established, effective and close relationship that all managers have with their teams. We have used counselling to help employees with a variety of work and personal issues. For A.G. Barr the Counselling-on-Request service is a cost effective, flexible and responsive resource that meets our organisation’s needs perfectly.”

A distinguishing feature of our managed referral service is the provision of clinical reports which are given to employers in regards to employees who have been referred for counselling and assessment.  

Our clinical counselling reports deliberately mirror an OH assessment report. They are practical, solution-focused and unambiguous.  

By enabling your employee, line management or HR to work in conjunction with WSM, we can rapidly assess an employee and impartially advise if and how their ability to work is impaired. Practical objectives and outcomes of the therapy can be agreed and on completion of the therapy, assessment is made on what progress has been achieved.

Assessment and clinical reports enable managers to take some control of the problem, moving the situation forward, whilst supporting the employee through a difficult time.

Our HR-led managed referrals do not replace, but are complementary, to our self-referral and fully confidential employee-led EAP services.