Welfare and wellbeing was an overarching theme at last week’s Police Superintendents’ Association (PSA) Annual Conference. In Police Scotland, we have seen a massive acceleration in the prevalence of psychological illness – often stress – and that is echoed in what we heard at the conference from colleagues in England and Wales.
It is vitally important that superintendents look after their own wellbeing as well as that of the people they’re responsible for. After all, if you are not well yourself, it’s impossible to properly look after the men and women that you lead. This is a huge challenge in policing.
We are always keen to ask the question: how are we looking after our members who are doing 50 or 60 hours a week, taking on high-risk, high-profile jobs? We need to make sure that we set up superintendents to look after the welfare of the people that they lead, by making sure that their own welfare is protected.
So much about the psychological burden of stress is about people being overwhelmed by workloads and by the amount of scrutiny they face. How do we maintain a high-quality performance in the face of that? As I’ve said before, a lot of that is down to ensuring we have enough resource to deal with everyday tasks, as well as policing large-scale events and VIP visits. At the moment, there isn’t enough resource, and people are making themselves ill.
This is why staff associations are so important, because officers can often be their own worst enemy. We always want to try to do that extra job, that additional turn, because we understand that otherwise someone else will have to take it on.
But, a lot of the time, the things we are willing to endure because of our sense of duty are not acceptable at an organisational level. We congratulate ourselves when VIP visits have been policed really well. But we also need to acknowledge that they shouldn’t take the level of commitment that they currently do. That’s a systemic failure of not getting enough resource into the service to deliver.
That needs to change, because it’s currently a slow-motion train crash – I can already see the increase in attrition, I can already see the price that people are paying with their health and their morale.
I find that senior officers very rarely go off sick, but see when they do it’s really hard to get them back, because they’ve waited to a point where it’s become critical. I’ve seen colleagues go through the ill health retirement process as a result of mental health disorders. That is the reality.
We need to be looking much further back to work out how we avoid getting to that point. Some of it is about really basic questions: do you have enough people to do the job? Are you able to take your annual leave and rest days? Is your duty time a reasonable and appropriate ask? Is the service compliant with workforce agreements as they relate to duty hours, and as they relate to on-call rosters? Too often, the answer to these questions is no.