AN­GE­LO JE­DIDI­AH

an­ge­lo.je­didi­ah@guardian.co.tt

Free coun­selling un­der the Em­ploy­ee As­sis­tance Pro­gramme (EAP) for teach­ers has been halt­ed, says the Trinidad and To­ba­go Uni­fied Teach­ers’ As­so­ci­a­tion (TTUTA), forc­ing ed­u­ca­tors to pay out of pock­et for men­tal health sup­port. Ques­tions are now mount­ing over the Gov­ern­ment’s com­mit­ment to sup­port­ing teach­ers’ men­tal health.

In a memo to its mem­ber­ship yes­ter­day, TTUTA said it has ver­i­fied that EAP ser­vices for teach­ers have been in­ter­rupt­ed, forc­ing them to pay to ac­cess coun­selling.

The EAP ser­vice, which falls un­der the of­fice of the Chief Per­son­nel Of­fi­cer, is fo­cused on en­hanc­ing em­ploy­ee health and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty through pre­ven­tion, iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and res­o­lu­tion of per­son­al and fam­i­ly prob­lems. Em­ploy­ees of the pub­lic ser­vice can ac­cess five in­di­vid­ual free ses­sions an­nu­al­ly.

TTUTA pres­i­dent Crys­tal B Ashe la­belled the re­moval of the move as a “grave in­jus­tice” and called for the ser­vice to be re­stored.

Some teach­ers took to so­cial me­dia to ex­press their dis­may with the move, with one user say­ing, “The Gov­ern­ment does not care about our salaries or men­tal health–imag­ine that.”

One re­cent­ly re­tired teacher, who wished to re­main anony­mous, re­count­ed that EAP has been es­sen­tial, not on­ly for her­self, but al­so for her fam­i­ly.

“In 2019, ther­a­py was rec­om­mend­ed for my daugh­ter due to a med­ical con­di­tion ... the pan­dem­ic made the ser­vice vi­tal to her as she nav­i­gat­ed uni­ver­si­ty,” the teacher said.

“It’s the one thing I con­sid­ered that we teach­ers re­ceived from our em­ploy­ers, since it’s in­ter­na­tion­al­ly known that teach­ing is an ex­treme­ly high-stress, low-pay­ing job. Just that one ser­vice made teach­ing that much more bear­able.”

Mean­while, Trinidad and To­ba­go Na­tion­al Nurs­es As­so­ci­a­tion (TTNNA) pres­i­dent Idi Stu­art raised con­cerns over the dis­con­tin­u­a­tion of ex­ter­nal coun­selling ser­vices, and nurs­es hav­ing to bear the cost them­selves.

Cur­rent­ly, nurs­es re­ly sole­ly on in­ter­nal EAP ser­vices with­in their own work­places, which Stu­art said lim­its con­fi­den­tial­i­ty, re­sult­ing in nurs­es de­fer­ring ac­cess to pro­fes­sion­al help.

“There’s no health in­sur­ance plan for health­care work­ers, no life in­sur­ance plan for health­care work­ers,” Stu­art said.

“It’s part of a wider short­com­ing of the health sec­tor, where health sec­tor work­ers are not tak­en care of.”

And with men­tal health is­sues on the rise, psy­chi­a­trist Dr Var­ma Deyals­ingh said free and con­fi­den­tial coun­selling for pub­lic ser­vants was vi­tal.

“If those [ser­vices] are not of­fered, we need now to en­sure that the clin­ics we have out­side– the well­ness clin­ics, the men­tal health and well­ness clin­ics, the psy­chi­atric out­pa­tient clin­ics … we have to make sure that they are now staffed bet­ter and open longer hours, and we have to make sure those clin­ics could take up the slack,” he said.