Recession impacting on EAPs says Canada life

The recession is having a distinct effect on the usage of employee assistance programmes (EAP) in the workplace through employees feeling increasingly stressed, according to Canada Life.

Speaking at the Canada Life ISMA UK 2009 conference entitled ‘A Changing World - Stressing the Positives', Colin Micklewright, head of group income protection business development at the provider, outlined two ways in which the current economic crisis has impacted on the claims data for EAP programmes across the group risk market.

Micklewright revealed that to date in 2009 there had been an increase in the amount of claims for cancer treatment.

He said: "What I am surprised to see is that so many of the claims we have had this year are not stress, anxiety or depression but are for cancer. And we've been told to expect that because times like this are when immune systems break down. It tends to happen in depressions. We were expecting more claims at the height of the recession although they are not what we expected to happen - they tend to be cancer-related claims."

Rather more predictably, Micklewright said, there has been a substantial increase in the use by employees of EAP programmes to enable them back to work: "I was doing some research yesterday that suggested that there has been a 75% increase in the utilisation of EAP in recent times. That shouldn't surprise us too much as people are worried about losing their job and there is more stress in the workplace."