EARLY force contact with sick officers will hopefully help address what is causing them to be off work ill, the chairman of Essex Police Federation has said.<\/p>\n
Mark Smith thanked the force and chief constable Steve Kavanagh, for making a greater investment in occupational health. He was speaking after it was revealed more than 350 officers have been signed off with stress and other mental disorders in the past 18 months.<\/p>\n
Mr Smith said: \u201cIn May I highlighted to the chief that there has been a lack of investment in occupational health. The chief has listened to the Federation and has made a greater investment in occupational health and has also allowed the department to decide where and how the investment is used.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe thank him for that.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are also working closely with the force\u2019s performance improvement unit to help educate managers on sickness policy and visits to officers. We are hoping that this early contact will help identify the causation factors and get them addressed.\u201d<\/p>\n
Monty Montgomery, Essex Police Federation secretary, said: \u201cWe are trying to look at the causes of the stress\u2026 the biggest cause of stress at the moment appears to be change. And the constant attack on us by everybody.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut one of the big things is the actually workload\u2026 it just seems to be relentless and officers seem to be buckling under the stress of their workload which just seems to be going up and up and up.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr Montgomery said he had offered to do a \u201cstress survey within one of the specialist departments\u201d and that \u201cthe offer is still open to the chief.\u201d<\/p>\n
He added: \u201cWe want to help. We don\u2019t want to stand by idly and watch our members fall and topple over. Our force has increased the budget to occupational health. Which is really quite useful.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd we are getting officers now that are having counselling paid for whereas before it wasn\u2019t and the force is paying for medical treatment for officers whereas before they were just off sick.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think we are going to see a really big improvement until we see a period of stability and then we will start to look at what are the causes of stress.\u201d<\/p>\n
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EARLY force contact with sick officers will hopefully help address what is causing them to be off work ill, the chairman of Essex Police Federation has said. Mark Smith thanked\u2026 read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":184,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1348"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1348"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1348\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1349,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1348\/revisions\/1349"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}