POLICE officers should be subject to mandatory annual psychological check-ups to protect them from the insidious effects of trauma, South Yorkshire Police Federation has said.<\/p>\n
Steve Kent called for a culture change into the way officers\u2019 mental health is looked after.<\/p>\n
He said: \u201cWe are looking at a domino effect. We\u2019re seeing officers fall ill more and more, and now that society is more comfortable talking about it, we are really opening up Pandora\u2019s Box.<\/p>\n
“We need to seriously invest in and examine mental health for police officers who are facing trauma and the drip-drip effect of dealing with horrific incidents and victims every day. The only way to deal with that, ultimately, is to have mandatory psychological check-ups once a year for every police officer. That\u2019s going to cost a lot of money and that needs to come centrally.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd we need to see a real culture change because we are seeing a lot of officers starting to break. And that includes officers much older in service who are getting nearer to retirement breaking. So we really do need to start having open conversations of the unique stresses and traumas that police officers face.\u201d<\/p>\n
Steve said the service is now good at clearing up the problems, but it has less success preventing them in the first place. He said that in order to better prevent trauma, huge injections of funding would be needed to increase officer numbers and reduce pressure.<\/p>\n
He said: \u201cYou would need to double the officers we\u2019re recruiting and seriously invest in policing. Some of this could be dealt with by ridding HMICFRS and ridding forces of needless bureaucracy – because there\u2019s no two ways about it, forces are under pressure to chase targets. We need to focus on quality more than quantity, and give our cops the time to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Federation has extended its counselling provision and, alongside force assistance, any officer that needs mental health support should be able to access it, Steve added.<\/p>\n