Federation looking at prevention and cure on sickness

ESSEX Police Federation has vowed to work with the force to try and get to the bottom of high sickness rates in the force and to get officers fit and healthy and back to work.

Secretary Monty Montgomery (pictured) said he is “trying to work with Human Resources and health services to look at the causations of stress” in the force. Officers took nearly 12.75 days off sick during the year to April – with stress being one of the main factors.

This 2014 figure was up from 8.28 days per officer in 2008.

Mr Montgomery said: “I have offered to do a stress survey within departments that are suffering from particularly high levels of stress. And what I think it is important to do is if we look at the causation of stress and we can perhaps reduce that, then that will reduce stress on officers. So I am working with health services and HR.”

He added: “One of the other ways that I am trying to reduce sickness is to encourage people to go back to work even if it is on recuperative or restrictive duties and we need to be a little more imaginative about what we can do.

“We went through a period of time when we were restricted by process because the policy is that we can’t create a job for someone who comes back on restrictive or recuperative duties. And I understand that but sometimes if we were a little bit more imaginative we can get people back at work a lot quicker. People don’t want to be sat at home.

“They want to be back and work and be proud of being police officers.”

Mr Montgomery also raised concerns that front line officers who are fit for work are spending their first few rest days recovering from the six days off, four days on shift pattern.

He said: “What do officers do on their first couple of rest days? Because indications that I am having is that an awful lot of officers come home after six working days and they just collapse.

“They are totally burnt out for two of the rest days, which means they only have two of the rest days that are any use to them to have free time, down time with the family. And it’s those officers that we need to be looking after as well – not just those that are off sick. So we need to look at the causation factors.

“Whether it is officers working in a non-safe environment, whether there are issues with performance management, whether there is bullying in the workplace, workload, or the type of work that officer is doing.

“Do we need to perhaps think about putting some extra measures in place to protect officers that are working for example in child abuse? Do we need to put in extra measures for those officers?”