Officers should not use annual leave to cover sickness
THE Chairman of South Yorkshire Police Federation has urged officers against using any annual leave or re-rostered rest days to cover for sickness.
A study has found that 76% of police officers admitted to taking annual leave instead of phoning in sick or to using holiday to finish work that should be done in normal working hours.
Neil Bowles, Federation Chairman, said: “We need to know the true statistics of sickness.”
He added: “We’ve noticed both from HR and from our point of view that there’s a lot more officers complaining about stress and anxiety at work, workloads, the amount of hours they have to work, their rest days being cancelled.
“Even our management are recognising it. There’s a specific wellbeing group being set up, one to cover both the Humberside and South Yorkshire, which our secretary, Jim Lucas, is part of.
“We have got employee assistance programmes on the intranet that people can join confidentially, for free, and get all sorts of health advice and coping strategies. Our occupational health unit are so busy that they probably need more staff to cope, because on top of the normal policing business that our members have, we’ve also got the ongoing legacy issues of Hillsborough coming to conclusion with the inquest, but that won’t stop there because no doubt CPS will want to think about criminal charges.
“We’ve got the ongoing CSE issue through seven or eight different enquiries. And the possibility of an Orgreave enquiry over the tops of our heads, but luckily for that latter one, I don’t think there’ll be anyone left serving that was involved at the time.”
What would the message be to members that are struggling with burnout?
“I know why officers do it; it’s so that their attendance criteria stays reasonable so that they can actually apply for lateral movement, promotion and even overtime,” said Mr Bowles.
“But I would certainly advise against using any annual leave or re-rostered rest days to cover for sickness. We need to know the true statistics of sickness, if you’re on annual leave you can be recalled so we don’t want people who are unfit for duty being recalled, and until the true figures are known there’s not a lot that management or the Federation can do to support the members.