Keeping Employee's Sober and In Treatment: Not Your Problem, But on Second Thought...

You actually are key. Now, don't let that put a lot of pressure on you as a DOT Supervisor. Reasonable Suspicion Training does not include any mandatory requirement to learn about follow-up, but would you like to know more about how it is done? It's the employee's responsibility of course to follow-through with any treatment recommendations or education recommendations, but in the case of treatment, it gets much trickier. Here is a follow-up chart that we recommend to employee assistance professionals or medical staff who are seeking to keep an employee in treatment who has been diagnosed as having addictive disease. The idea in this follow up system I created is to capture or catch the pending relapse and intervene before it can happen be weekly review of the employee's participation in a program of recovery. The most important factor in this chart is diminished involvement in the recovery program, and specifically, AA meetings. For example: An employee after exiting treatment following a positive DOT test participates gladly in 5 AA meeting per week, and has a sponsor with whom he or she speaks with five days per week. All of a sudden this drops to 3 meetings per week and verbal contact with the sponsor twice per week. ALARM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! No relapse yet, but it is coming. And you have a motivated employee. A lack of follow up as you can see will contribute directly to the failure of the patient's recovery. The treatment program should handle all of these details, but as a supervisor, you should continue to document performance issues and provide work-related feedback to the employee regularly.