New Support For Fatigued Officers
South Yorkshire Police officers suffering from fatigue and sleep problems are being encouraged to take part in a new programme from Oscar Kilo.
The SAFER (Sleep, Alertness and Fatigue in Emergency Responders) programme has been put together in response to the National Wellbeing Survey, which found that fatigue was a big problem for police officers due to long work hours, shift patterns, untreated sleep disorders and stress.
However, South Yorkshire Police Federation Chair Steve Kent said that while it was good to recognise the problem in policing, he warned that officers would remain stressed and tired as long as they were under so much pressure.
He said: “It’s great, it needs to be recognised, it needs to be front and centre, but it really does tramline with the work about demand in general. It’s a forced narrative to expect officers to be able to take their foot off the pedal when we’re at capacity like we are.”
SAFER is an education and screening programme developed with experts from the University of Surrey. In a similar programme the university conducted at Harvard Medical School, they found that over a third of police officers and firefighters were at risk of at least one sleep disorder without knowing it.
Steve continued: “The good thing about this is that it’s a recognition of the problem. I don’t necessarily think there’s a solution to this on the horizon, because we’re so busy, and we have to police proactively if we’re not policing reactively.
“So we can’t go, ‘Well, it’s a quiet night on a Tuesday evening, we can all sit in the station for three hours and try to catch up.’ It doesn’t work like that in policing; we’re expected to be on it and at it 24/7.
“The only way we’re going to address that is getting the resource in, invest in policing, so that the pressure on our individual officers is not quite as much as it is now.
“If we do that, then we can realistically look at saying to cops, ‘Look, you can have better rests on your days off, you don’t have to do so much in forced overtime, you don’t have to stay on at the end of a shift because there are incidents on the queue’.”
But Steve encouraged members to do the course so they could express their honest feelings about how tired they are.
He said: “We do local surveys and Federation surveys, so the information is already out there, but you can’t have too many evidence-gathering tools to show how knackered officers are. And I know they’re exhausted, I speak to them all the time, so it’s a given.”
Find out more here: https://oscarkilo.org.uk/new-better-sleep-toolkit-launched/