Counseling and Coaching

New Avenues Employee Assistance and Work-Life Programs maximize workforce productivity, well-being, and performance.

Services include:

• Employer specifies how many visits for short term, solution-oriented face-to-face service.
• On-line/Telephonic Counseling
• Large Provider network of EAP counselors close to all work and home sites.
• Short-term, solution-focused counseling for employees and family members. Services to assist employees and their family members with stress, life event changes, parenting issues, marital or divorce adjustment issues, grief and loss, substance abuse problems, work-life balance.
• Coaching to be a more effective Supervisor, Manager, or employee.
• Financial counseling for those employees troubled by money stressors.
• Employee Orientation and Supervisory Training.
• Management Referral
• Training
• Critical Incident Stress Debriefing (CISD)
• On-site Consultation and Mediation
• On-line Work-Life Resource Program

 This is what consumers of New Avenues EAP have said on follow-up satisfaction surveys:

• “Thank you for your support and sensitive professionalism. Counseling has been most helpful.”
• “Thank you for your insight to our relationship.  Your recommendations were well received and beneficial to our marriage.”
• “I appreciate all the new tools our counselor has given us.”
• “I have worked in several places with EAP’s, but this is the best and most friendly.”
• “I had a positive experience with New Avenues.  Thank you for your assistance in an emotional time of need.”
• “I cannot say enough good things about New Avenues!  We are continuing counseling.  Thank you!”
• “Thank you so much for helping me find a counselor that fit my needs.  It has helped a lot.”
• “Our New Avenues clinician is wonderful.  He has been a real blessing in our life.  He made us feel so very safe and comfortable.  I have been pleased with this service.”
• “Thank you so much.  Death is not easy to accept, but it helps to talk to someone who can help you through it.  Thank you again.”
• “It is a great benefit to be able to use New Avenues!  I really liked the counselor I was referred to.  I was very comfortable with her and she gave me several positive suggestions.  I would definitely see her again, if necessary.”

What is a Critical Incident?

It is very common, in fact quite normal, for employees to experience emotional aftershocks when they have witnessed a traumatic event or have lost a close co-worker.

A critical incident is a traumatic event or incident that causes strong emotional reactions, which have the potential to interfere with a person’s ability to function at work and home.

New Avenues can assist you and your employees in quickly addressing the trauma issues and can provide support and guidance in moving forward.

New Avenues has counselors ready to provide Critical Incident Stress Response. The professional counselor(s) will diffuse and debrief affected parties as a group. One-on-one support can also be arranged.

New Avenues Provides Help When You Most Need It…

• Industrial/Workplace Accidents
• Acts of Violence
• Death of Employee
• Robberies
• Disasters

Call New Avenues for Critical Incident Response Services: 800-731-6501

To learn more, contact us:

Financial Counseling

With today’s tough economic conditions, many employee families are experiencing serious financial problems that lead to major stress. New Avenues has contracted with GreenPath Financial Wellness, a not-for-profit, accredited consumer credit counseling agency to provide financial counseling for members through the EAP. Since 1961, GreenPath Financial Wellness has been helping consumers ease financial pressures through healthy money management.

Certified by the National Foundation for Credit Counseling.

GreenPath provides education and practical ways to manage your lifestyle and your money

• Consumer Credit Counseling
• Debt Analysis
• Debt Reduction Planning
• Budgeting & Money Management
• Education about Credit Cards
• Housing Counseling Services
• Bankruptcy Counseling
• Confidentiality Guaranteed

Call New Avenues EAP for your referral to GreenPath Financial Wellness Online Resources 24/7.

Login to find more financial guidance available to our EAP Members!

Highlights include 100’s of articles to give you guidance on decisions and planning:

• Balancing the Budget
• Your Credit Report
• Your Credit Score
• Financial Planning Took Kit to Get Debt Free
• Money Saving Tips
• Splurging on a Budget
• Repaying Student Loans
• Must Do List for People on a Debt Management Plan
• Calculators
• Should I rent or buy?
• Should I refinance my home?
• How much car can I afford?
• How long will it take to pay off my credit cards?
• How much should I save each month?
• How long will my retirement last?
• Legal Forms
• Family Financial Statement
• Identity Theft Worksheet
• Dispute Credit Charges
• Demand Credit Agency Cease Contact

Resource Links:

American Bar Association

National Consumer Law Center

Lawyer Locator – American Bar Association

Request Free Annual Credit Report

Children’s Health Insurance Programs (CHIPS) Information by State

"Focus on Success" Management Referrals

Case Management for the Workplace

New Avenues specializes in case management for challenging, difficult, and sometimes politically sensitive employee, executive, and professional work performance issues.

In an average year, New Avenues handles over 200 cases - employees who were referred by Human Resource or administrative officers for disciplinary and non-disciplinary reasons.

Personal and family problems can affect people at all income levels, and all occupations. Those problems eventually can affect work performance.  The Focus on Success program goal is to help employees be successful in their jobs and careers. New Avenues is there to facilitate giving an employee an opportunity to obtain confidential assistance to improve their work performance. New Avenues acts as a neutral third party to coordinate the referrals, provider selection and communication, and to share information, subject to consent, with the employer to establish compliance and accountability.

These are typically the most sensitive and time consuming personnel issues involving corrective actions for workplace conduct or policy violations, employees demonstrating disruptive, unacceptable or troubling behavior, fitness for duty evaluations, impaired professionals, and potential liability situations.

• Counseling, coaching, and accountability for the Employee who has demonstrated workplace behavior or performance problems.

• Focus on Success Comprehensive Workplace Case Management Services including referral to appropriate professional(s), consent for release of information and job problem documentation forms, coordination of treatment, oversight of the process as a neutral third party,and compliance reporting.

• Designated Case Manager, an experienced licensed social worker is the communication point person for all parties.

• Highly trained network of providers experienced in assessment and treatment of occupational –workplace performance issues.

Fitness-for-Duty Evaluations

• Psychiatric and psychological assessments, risk assessments of psychological conditions that may have bearing on an employee’s ability to perform essential job duties.

• Fitness-for Duty evaluations for employees demonstrating uncharacteristic behavior, conduct or threats.

Focus on Success Management Referral Forms: For access to these forms, login here.

The premier solution.

Health plans can achieve the maximum savings and cost effective solutions for addressing behavioral health by positioning a New Avenues EAP as the entry point for early intervention and then use New Avenues to administer its behavioral health benefits.

With this delivery model, the organization can achieve maximum savings by reducing  behavioral health claims that hit the health plan. How does this work?

• Gives employees easy access to professional resources for addressing common personal and family adjustment issues for daily living and keeps these claims outside of the health plan;
• Short term counseling costs at the EAP level are absorbed by New Avenues, and only longer term more significant behavioral health claims run through the health plan;
• Longer term professional services, psychiatric services, inpatient and specialized behavioral healthcare costs that do go through the health plan are managed for risk, quality, and effectiveness by the Care Management Staff.
• Obtain the lowest provider negotiated rates with the New Avenues – MBHN provider network selected as an approved PPO for the health plan; New Avenues has demonstrated consistently that health plan in-network claims are reduced by 35-50% off retail charges.
• New Avenues provides employees with continuity of care between their EAP and health plan with minimal disruption;
• The EAP delivery model facilitates members using in-network providers which reduces employees’ out of pocket expenses and supports the cost savings for the health plan.
• Care management staff focuses on reaching out to members with serious mental health and substance abuse conditions to improve probability of recovery and resilience, treatment adherence in order to avoid relapses, inpatient hospitalizations, ER visits, lost work time, suicide, and health complications.
• Risk management strategies include coordinating care with member’s primary care physicians, specialized protocols for ADHD testing, and case management services for persons with workplace performance issues, depression/mood disorders, autism spectrum disorders, serious mental illness or chronic substance abuse conditions. 

Welcome.

We are pleased to present highlights from the New Avenues Training Catalogue.

Each of our popular presentations is customized to meet the needs of your organization. We make every effort to meet your timeframe requirements.

Employee Relations & Compliance

• Diversity
• Generations In The Workplace
• Working Together –The Challenge of Personality Differences
• Respect And Civility In The Workplace
• Respect And Civility In The Healthcare Setting
• Harassment
• Bullying
• Managing Conflict – Effective Strategies For Achieving A More Harmonious Workplace
• Workplace Violence Awareness
• Dealing With The Stress of A Difficult Patron, Customer, or Patient

Drug and Alcohol Education

• Reasonable Suspicion For Drug And Alcohol Abuse
• DOT Reasonable Suspicion Training
• Drug And Alcohol Awareness For Healthcare Settings

Best Practices

• Interviewing Job Applicants
• Effective Documentation For Supervisors
• Cultivating Your Leadership Skills
• Communicating For Success
• The Art Of Time Management

Wellness & Work-Life Balance

• Stress Management To Enjoy A Busy Life
• Choose To Be Happy – It Is All About Attitude
• Avoiding The Emotional Eating Cycle

Organizations in Transition

• Maintaining Resilience During Times of Change
• Managing A Reduction In Force: Guidelines For Managers
• Reclaiming Survivors Following A Downsizing
• Mergers & Acquisitions: The Human Factor

Specialized Programs

• Teambuilding
• Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
• Leadership Development And Team Building
• Bias And The Hidden Brain

Wellness Initiatives

Did you know?

• 2/3 of all office visits to family physicians are due to stress related symptoms.
• Workplace stress causes approximately one million U.S. employees to miss work each day.
• 43% adults suffer adverse health effects from stress.
• Stress is linked to the six leading causes of death – heart disease, cancer, lung ailments, accidents, cirrhosis of the liver, and suicide.
• Regular exercise can help people reduce stress, depression, and anxiety and enable them to better cope with adversity.

According to the American Psychological Association, 80% of Americans say that during the past few years they have become more aware of how their mental health and emotions can affect their physical health. But our experience indicates that moving a workforce from simply awareness, through stages of readiness to change, to actually seeing employees make lifestyle changes to weight management, exercise, stress management takes incredible organizational focus.

Successful company wellness initiatives involve:

• work cultures that emphasize total health and work-life balance,
• making health toolsavailable like risk appraisals and information,
• the implementation of creative incentive programs,
• wellness champions, and
• delivering constant and consistent messages to reinforce the importance of making healthy lifestyle choices.

New Avenues is Your Partner in delivering a variety of program to promote employee wellness. You will find a “one stop shop” for information tools, risk assessments, articles, integrated EAP programs, and training opportunities.

New Avenues will provide or will work with your Wellness Partners to promote a culture of healthy employees. New Avenues can support corporate wellness programs with cost effective, affordable solutions.

Screening:

• Biometric on-site health screenings - Blood tests, blood pressure, body mass index.
• Health Risk Assessments with employee individualized reports and aggregate corporate reports
• Self Assessments for employees online

Counseling:

Integrate the EAP into corporate wellness programs. The EAP is an invaluable resource to address employees’ stressors and readiness for change. Many people cannot step on the path for fitness, or stay on the path even with the best of intentions without first looking at some factors affecting their mood, attitude, or lifestyle habits. Having some personal one to one counseling often can help a person find constructive ways to cope with stressors, and remove barriers to engaging in healthy lifestyle choices. Counseling can give an employee and opportunity to work with attitudes, self esteem, and/or family issues that may be affecting an employee’s readiness, belief systems, or capacity to make lifestyle changes.

Wellness Coaching:

As part of a comprehensive corporate wellness program, New Avenues can provide a targeted cost effective approach to help those employees who carry the highest risk factors.

• Health coaching is available through New Avenues to support and guide employees on their goals for achieving a healthy lifestyle.
• Stratify the workforce with an initial health risk appraisal program that identifies the most prevalent conditions affecting your workforce health and medical claims.
• Telephonic outreach coaching is targeted for the top 20% of employees with high risk factors.
• Online tools for each employee to track and monitor progress.

Whether the goal is to loose or maintain weight, adhere to a medication regimen, stop smoking, reduce stress, revise one’s dietary choices, get more exercise – a coach is someone who can partner and support a plan.

Onsite Training Programs:,

Lunch and Learns:

Stress Management

Smoking Cessation

Emotional Eating & Stress

What Makes me Happy?

Coping with Life Event or Organizational Changes

Lifestyle Choices that Make a Difference

Online Training and Self Assessments in the New Avenues Work-Life Resource Center

Encourage employees to take charge of their health, understand how their lifestyle affects their risks for disease, and find out what they can do to stay healthy. The online worklife program is very robust with a number of risk assessments, fitness self assessments and profiles.

Tools for Employees to manage their health.

These are just a few of the topics covered in self-assessments, articles, online seminars and resource links found in New Avenues robust Work-Life Center.

• Evaluate Risk for Different Conditions and Learn How to Reduce Risk: Breast cancer, diabetes, heart disease, bladder, cognitive decline, colon cancer, osteoporosis, melanoma, and many others.
• Discover How Lifestyle Affects One’s Health: self assessments for career burnout, eating behavior, fitness assessments, stress style, work addiction and more.
• Learn about any symptoms or health conditions such as depression, emotional health, menopause, insomnia, etc.
• Read articles
• Connection to Medline Plus Medline Plus is provided by the U.S. National Libraries of Medicine and is available in English and Spanish versions. It includes information, links and resources on:
  • 700 Health Topics
  • Over 165 Interactive Tutorials
  • Drug Info
  • Medical Encyclopedia
  • Medical News
  • Directories to find physicians, dentists and hospitals
  • Clinical Trials
  • Senior Health
  • Surgery Videos

To enter the wealth of information on Health and Lifestyle click the button below and enter your password “EAP”.

Employee Healthy Exchange Newsletter Information free and with permission for the Employer to use in publications, newsletters and wellness campaigns.

New Avenues provides a library of short, to the point articles on a wide range of family, health and wellness, and work/life topics.

Health and Wellness Fairs: New Avenues is pleased to attend and participate in company wellness and benefit fairs.