An Employee Assistance Programme is an arrangement between an employer and a care provider: the employer makes confidential professional support available, and employees use it when life or work requires, without their difficulties becoming office knowledge. Safe Places designs and runs EAPs for Ugandan organisations, and every one is customised, because the workforces of a bank, a factory and an NGO do not face identical pressures.

The components

Organisational needs assessment. The engagement starts by understanding your workplace: the pressures, the patterns of absence or difficulty you are seeing, what support already exists, and what is missing. What we build rests on this.

Individual consultation. Employees can consult our professionals confidentially — about stress, mood, substance use, family strain, or whatever else is eroding them.

Counselling. Ongoing counselling where a consultation shows it would help, drawing on the same counselling specialities we offer every client.

Pathways into treatment. When an employee needs more than workplace-level support — assessment, out-patient care, or something more intensive — the pathway into Safe Places’ clinical services is already in place, with no cold start.

Awareness and empowerment sessions. Clinician-led education for the whole workforce, so recognising difficulty stops depending on luck.

Stress-management training. Practical training for teams, described on our awareness and training page.

How employees actually use it

Two doors. An employee can come forward themselves, directly to us, without asking anyone’s permission. Or a manager or HR can suggest the service to someone they are concerned about — a referral, not an order. Either way the employee’s care is confidential from that point: participation, content, and records sit with us, shared beyond the care team only with the employee’s consent, where the law requires or permits it, or where safety makes it necessary.

What the employer learns

The boundary, drawn honestly: employers get what they need to run the programme, not windows into individual care. What an employer learns is agreed per engagement, during setup. Where the agreement covers it, an employer can be told whether a referral was taken up — nothing clinical, ever. We will not design an arrangement that makes employees unsafe using the service, because that defeats the thing you are paying for.

In practice: Cotton On Foundation

Setting one up

Call our Client Services Officer — Partnerships on +256 709 266549, the main line on +256 770 700944, or write to info@safeplacesuganda.com marked “organisational enquiry.” Bring a rough headcount and the concern that prompted you; the needs assessment does the rest.