SENIOR leaders must do more to understand and mitigate the effects of police officer fatigue, Steve Taylor, Essex Police Federation Chairman has warned.<\/p>\n
Steve was talking after the issue was discussed at the Police Federation of England and Wales Annual Conference this week.<\/p>\n
He said: \u201cWe are quickly approaching, if we haven\u2019t already come to, a point in which it\u2019s no longer acceptable for an officer not to have that break, for an officer not to have 5 minutes to themselves in a very, very busy, sometimes 12-hour day.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd doctor after professor after degree entrant are telling us that fatigue is something that we ignore at our peril. Our senior leaders in the organisation need to start reflecting on that.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen, as we are in Essex, we\u2019re considering shift patterns, we\u2019re considering supervision levels, we\u2019re considering the wider resources because we have a small increase in our overall numbers, they all play a part and the fatigue of the officer, if you\u2019re serious about health and wellbeing, you need to be serious about fatigue. To date we haven\u2019t been.\u201d<\/p>\n
Police officer fatigue is an issue too important to be ignored and should never be dismissed as being ‘just part of the job’, the Conference in Birmingham heard.<\/p>\n
Steve added: \u201cWe\u2019ve always considered ourselves to be ahead of the curve in terms of health and wellbeing in Essex. We have a Live Well, Feel Well campaign that receives external support. We\u2019ve slashed our referral times from 12 weeks to 4 days for occupational health, and we have access to more mental health professionals. But it\u2019s still not perfect.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s so much more we could do. The federation can play its part in that, but we need a nice, firm steer from the organisation.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
SENIOR leaders must do more to understand and mitigate the effects of police officer fatigue, Steve Taylor, Essex Police Federation Chairman has warned. Steve was talking after the issue was\u2026 read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4332,"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\/4299"}],"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=4299"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4299\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4333,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4299\/revisions\/4333"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4332"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}