Substance Abuse Treatment Preferences in an Employed Population

Abstract

This study examined preferences for sources of help for a hypothetical alcohol or drug use issue among a sample of privately insured employees without claims or reports of past-year substance use disorder (SUD) treatment (N = 133). Respondents indicated that family and friends were the most strongly preferred source of help. More than one fourth of respondents indicated they would be very likely to seek Employee Assistance Program (EAP) help (26.7%; SE = 7.3%). These findings suggest that employer efforts to ameliorate workers’ underutilization of SUD treatment and EAPs should focus on improving outreach and patient education about treatment options through available EAP and behavioral health benefits.

KEYWORDS:

• Employee Assistance Program
• substance use disorders
• treatment preferences
• workplace

Acknowledgments

This study was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse through the Brandeis/Harvard Research Center on Managed Care and Drug Abuse Treatment (grant #P50 DA010233-09). The authors thank Galina Zolotusky for programming, Amity Quinn for research assistance, and Bernard McCann for helpful comments on this manuscript.

Notes

Note. Sample description data are presented unweighted. N varies for some rows due to missing data; percents are based on non-missing data, missing data (< 7%) for all variables.