The activation of the helping professions of the South African Police Service (SAPS) with respect to an internal Employee Assistance Programme in the West Metropole

by Biehl, James.

Employee Assistance Programmes are to be established in all government departments, according to a circular of the director-general of the Department Public Service Administration. According to the head office of SAPS, the three disciplines of the Helping Professions should implement this programme. The Helping Professions consist of the Chaplains, Psychological Services and Police Social Work Services. The services rendered by the three disciplines were fragmented and had to be streamlined and coordinated. This dissertation researched the activation of the existing helping professions in the West Metropole to participate in the development and integration of an effective internal EAP. This would result in more effective teamwork and minimising the duplication of services. In Chapter 1 the research problem was identified, namely activating the three disciplines into an EAP team for the benefit of the SAPS client. When this research was done, proper guidelines from the SAPS National Head Office were yet not in place. To put together an effective EAP team, the uniqueness of each discipline first had to be uncovered to ascertain its strong and weak points, and to determine how the three disciplines would complement one another. Attention was given to the relationship between their discipline-specific training and the core technologies of the EAP. Chapter 2 addresses these aspects.