Officer Sickness (291A/24)
Request
1) The total number of sick days taken by police officers for the period 01/1/2022 – 31/12/2022.
2) The total number of sick days taken by the police officers for the period 01/1/2022 – 31/12/2022 where mental health was a contributing factor to said absence.
3) A list of mental health / psychological conditions that were cited as reasons for absence if possible.
4) A breakdown of Q1 + Q2 by gender; age; rank.
5) A list of mental health support services available to policer officers.
6) A breakdown of police officers by gender; age; rank of the police officers who accessed these support services.
Response
Please find attached (291A_24_attachment.pdf). However, regarding question 4, please note that because the overall number of officers decreases, the higher the rank. To mitigate the risk of individual officers being identifiable from the data, information above Inspector has been aggregated as ‘Chief Inspector or above’. Any further breakdown of rank at this level is exempt by virtue of Section 40(2) – Personal information.
Section 40(2) allows for personal data to be withheld where release would breach the third party’s data protection rights. It would be unfair to release this information where any person could be identified from the data and in this case the right to privacy outweighs any public interest in release.
This letter serves as a refusal notice under Section 17 of the Freedom of Information Act for the withheld information.
Every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete. However, it is important to note that these data have been extracted from a number of data sources used by forces for police purposes. The detail collected to respond specifically to your request is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system. As a consequence, care should be taken to ensure data collection processes and their inevitable limitations are taken into account when interpreting those data.
The figures provided therefore are our best interpretation of relevance of data to your request, but you should be aware that the collation of figures for ad hoc requests may have limitations and this should be taken into account when those data are used.
If you decide to write an article / use the enclosed data we would ask you to take into consideration the factors highlighted in this document so as to not mislead members of the public or official bodies, or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.