Employee Assistance Program
Now Offering Telehealth
To schedule an appointment, call Stephanie Molina at 805-569-7808. If she does not answer you are welcome to leave a confidential voicemail.
We are here to help if there is a problem at work or in your personal life. We provide brief, confidential assistance and referrals for most problems at work and at home.
Services are available at no charge to employees, family members and significant others. We provide services in English and Spanish.
Confidential Psychological Counseling & Consultation Services
The Cottage Health Employee Assistance Program (EAP) invites all employees, medical residents and family members to use our confidential services. These services are provided free of charge for all employees and dependents.
The EAP is staffed by licensed therapists who provide confidential, brief psychological counseling and a wide variety of consultation services to managers.
Services are available in English and Spanish.
Individual, Couples and Family Counseling Services
All of us have problems occasionally, personal or work-related. Often we can resolve them on our own, but sometimes they persist and may affect our mental and physical health, well-being, work performance or self-esteem.
EAP counseling services are strictly confidential and will not become part of your personnel file.
Your counselor will not release any information to other individuals — including the fact that you have come to EAP — without your express permission. EAP provides assessment, counseling, and referral services for a broad range of personal and work-related issues, including:
Personal Issues
- Anxiety
- Depression
- Anger management
- Grief and loss
- Substance abuse (alcohol or other drugs)
- Traumatic events
- Domestic violence
- Crisis situations
- Parenting issues
- Stress
- Relationship concerns
- Coping with disabilities
- Transitioning to retirement
- Elder or dependent care
- Personal health
Work-Related Issues
- Interpersonal conflict (with supervisors, peers, or subordinates)
- Problems with job performance
- Organizational transitions
- Competing professional and personal demands
- Layoffs or terminations
- Workplace incivility
- Coping with hostile work environments
Services Available to Employees
Employee Counseling Services
Our highly experienced staff has expertise in treating a wide variety of presenting issues. Services are available at no charge to covered employees and their covered dependents.
Contact Us
Short-term Counseling
Many of the problems that people bring to the EAP can actually be resolved using our brief treatment approach. This usually involves about four counseling sessions, although there are exceptions. You and your counselor will work together to identify your problems and the best way to address your concerns either with the EAP, with our Employee Counseling Services or with a referral to an outside provider or program.
Referrals
While the EAP does not provide long-term treatment, we can provide you with referrals to Cottage’s Employee Counseling Services or local providers who do. We are acquainted with many qualified therapists and clinical programs in the Santa Barbara and Ventura Counties, including ones covered by your mental health insurance plan, and can often refer you to providers with specific expertise to meet on your needs.
Couples Counseling
If you and your spouse, partner, or significant other are experiencing relationship problems, the EAP can offer you short-term couples counseling aimed at improving communication, providing tools for conflict resolution and help with facilitating difficult discussions.
Coaching
Sometimes, employees do not need help with specific psychological, emotional or interpersonal issues, but may greatly benefit from individualized coaching. The EAP provides coaching for clients on the same basis as our counseling services, confidential, voluntary and at no cost. The focus is on problem-solving and skills development in areas such as assertiveness, communication, boundary setting and leadership.
Services Available to Managers
Consultations Available
If you believe your group would benefit from our psychoeducational services, you can consult with Stephanie Molina at 805-569-7808. She will help identify what kind of approach would work best for you and then design a one-time or ongoing program to meet those needs.
Management Consultations
As a manager or supervisor, you may find yourself dealing with behavior or performance problems that you’re not sure how to understand or deal with. Such situations may involve possible impairment due to mental health or substance abuse, problematic interpersonal relations, significant changes to your organization or poor team cohesion.
The EAP provides all supervisors and managers with free, confidential consultations about such situations, with the goal of creating effective strategies for dealing with them.
Facilitated Conversations
Conflict in working relationships can have a detrimental effect on how your team performs its work and on the overall workplace climate, and can lead to poor morale, incivility and complaints of a hostile work environment. Sometimes, the conflict centers on disagreements about how to work together to achieve shared business goals such as roles and responsibilities, priorities, deadlines clear work processes.
In such cases, the conflict may seem to have a significant psychological or emotional component, involve a serious personality clash, a breakdown of trust or an inability to resolve past issues. In such cases, a more clinically informed approach may be needed, such as the EAP’s Facilitated Conversation service.
This service is confidential and voluntary, where we will work with both parties to clear the air around past disputes as well as to establish new agreements for working together in the future.
Psychological Education
One of EAP’s areas of responsibility is to promote wellness and emotional intelligence within the Cottage Health community.
To this end, EAP can provide a wide variety of psychoeducational services to the Cottage community, including presentations, trainings, seminars, workshops and custom-tailored courses for different organizational groups and departments.
Traumatic Event Debriefing
In our hospital community, it is likely that a number of incidents occur every year that can have a profound, disturbing, or upsetting impact on our employees. Such critical incidents can include:
- Mass casualty events
- Natural disasters
- Fires
- Death of a patient or colleague
- Sexual and other forms of harassment
- Hostile patients or family members
- Interpersonal clashes
Such incidents are highly stressful and typically affect many people at once, sometime an entire workgroup or department. When the events happen, the EAP offers expert Traumatic Event Debriefing services. We will meet with staff to help them deal with the event, facilitate debriefing and process how the event has affected individuals and the group.
