NSW Ambulance Employee Assistance and Psychological Services Program

⁠⁠⁠New South Wales Ambulance seeks to engage a suitably qualified organisation to provide a range of Employee Assistance and Psychological Services. The service provider must perform all service components within the nominated service categories.

New South Wales Ambulance is an integral and dynamic part of the New South Wales Health System and one of the largest ambulance services in the world. Our core business is the delivery of emergency pre-hospital health care and non-emergency patient transport services. We are committed to providing high quality clinical care and health related transport services to over 7.25 million people in NSW, distributed across an area of 801,600 square kilometres.

New South Wales Ambulance employs approximately 5109 employees including 404 volunteers and 130 casual staff with 93 per cent being operational staff involved in the front line delivery of services. This includes paramedics, patient transport officers, first responders, volunteer ambulance officers, and specialised areas such as intensive care and extended care paramedics, control centre officers, special operations, counter disaster, aeromedical and medical retrieval. The remaining 7 per cent of our workforce are corporate and support staff who assist in the delivery of services,including mechanical workshops, finance and payroll, human resources and administration.

New South Wales Ambulance provides an integrated employee support system designed to ensure the health and welfare of our workforce. This includes an Employee Assistance Program (EAP), Grievance Contact Officers, Peer Support Program, Health and Wellbeing Program, Employee Mental Health and Resilience Program and Chaplaincy Services. These programs aim to provide confidential, preventive and proactive intervention for the early detection, identification and resolution of work and personal problems that may affect an employee’s work and wellbeing.

Staff are employed under a range of different working arrangements, including standard (Monday to Friday), flexible and shift work hours. Therefore the EAP Provider needs to be available 24 hours day, 7 days a week throughout the State.

The Service Provider will have capacity to deliver any or all of the service components 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

The new contract will commence 1 July 2016 for a period of 3 years with the 2 optional extensions of 12 months each, at the sole discretion of NSW Ambulance.

The Employee Assistance Program (EAP) Service requires the provision of advice, assistance and counselling services to NSW Ambulance employees and their immediate family.

The service provided must be confidential, consistent and the EAP service must be delivered to the highest professional standard.

The EAP Service encompasses a number of presenting issues including:

Work related issues, which include but are not limited to:
Interpersonal
Occupational health
Vocation
Performance management support
Change management support
Conflict resolution
Support for harassment and/or bullying
Career counselling
Stress management
Work life balance
Accident/injury
Shift work
Work role change
Organisational change
Burn out
Personal issues, which include but are not limited to:
Pain management
Child/adolescent issues
Blended/extended family
Marriage
Separation/divorce
Domestic violence
Life changes
Grief and trauma
Substance and other forms of addiction
The law
Medical/health
Sleep
Healthy eating and exercise
Psychological issues (including, but not limited to anger, anxiety, depression and self-esteem).