19 April 2011
A major culture shift is needed to address the problem of long-term sickness absence in the police force, according to leading psychiatrists.
Dr Derek Summerfield, a senior honorary lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London, said a move to an early intervention approach was essential to prevent protracted sickness absence.
He also called for closer working between occupational health departments and the NHS.
Summerfield, who served as consultant occupational psychiatrist to the Metropolitan Police between 2001 and 2004, reviewed 300 cases of officers retiring on mental health grounds. He found that long-term sickness absence was more strongly associated with workplace disputes than with formal mental illness.
The police’s occupational health system encouraged issues such as unresolved grievances, conflicts with colleagues and financial worries to have medical labels attached to them in order to allow officers to retire on mental health grounds, Summerfield concluded.
This medicalisation of non-specific symptoms created perverse incentives and prolonged disability, encouraging officers to present as disabled until their early retirements were agreed.
Writing on bmj.com today, Summerfield said: ‘To qualify for retirement on psychiatric grounds, an officer must be deemed “permanently disabled” from resuming the full duties of a police officer, a test which in my clinical judgement only a few could pass.
‘The number one predictive factor regarding a return to work and career was whether the officer wanted to, which no psychiatric formulation captures.’
In a commentary accompanying Summerfield’s review, Professor Simon Wessely, also from the Institute of Psychiatry, observed that the process of leaving the police force had become increasingly medicalised. This resulted in officers leaving the force ‘embittered and encumbered by inappropriate medical labels that will make it far more difficult for them ever to work again’.
