Ask Twice About Your Colleagues’ Wellbeing

Police officers are being urged to look out for their colleagues’ mental health, in the national Federation’s #AskTwice campaign.

The PFEW initiative aims to foster a supportive and inclusive work environment, where people feel valued, heard, and empowered to seek help when needed.

It also consists of a library of assets at polfed.org/campaigns/asktwice/. These offer guidance for those in moments of crisis, or people looking to support colleagues through challenging times.

Steve Kent, Chair of South Yorkshire Police Federation, said it was a “massively important campaign”. He continued: “We all talk about wellbeing and, to be fair to our force, in some respects we’re good at dealing with it. And we as a Federation provide a lot of support with counselling and other help.

“But the issue is that we tend to be dealing with the back end of it. We need to start proactively preventing poor wellbeing within the force.”

Steve added that officers’ mental health was also affected by a lack of resources, a poor work-life balance and often not being able to take leave.

He said: “We need to prevent officers getting broken, because we’re good at dealing with things when they’re broken, but we’re not so good at preventing them from being broken in the first place.”