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Police officer and staff sickness

Date of request: 1 January 2025
Reference: 007-25

Request

Between January 1st 2024 up to and including December 31st 2024:

  1. How many police officers and staff working for your force have taken sick leave of any length due to any mental health condition?
  2. How many police officers and staff working for your force have taken sick leave of any length due to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder?
  3. How many police officers and staff working for your force have been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder?
  4. How many work days have police officers and staff working for your force missed due to the suspected or diagnosed symptoms of PTSD?

Please provide the figures for officers and staff separately.

Response

Sick leave due to a mental health condition would be recorded under the group, Psychological Disorders. This includes the following subcategories:

Alcohol Drug Depend
Anxiety Nervousness
Bereavement
Depression
Eating Disorders
Insomnia
Mental Illness
Shock
Stress

Please find below table in relation to question 1 for the time frame 01/01/2024 until 31/12/2024, which provides data of the number of people who had at least one absence due to any of the listed Psychological Disorders.

Please note that if a person had absences for more than one psychological Disorder, they will only be counted once.

Police Officer Police Staff PCSO Total
496 347 44 887

In relation to question 2 to 4, we are not able to confirm whether Avon and Somerset Police holds the information you have requested. On this occasion the cost of determining whether we hold the information would exceed the limit set by the Freedom of Information Act. As a result, your request is refused under Section 12 of the Act.

This is because there is no specific category on our systems to record PTSD as a sickness reason. We record sickness reasons relating to mental health under the subcategories listed above. Details of PTSD could be recorded within an individual’s file under any of these broader or related categories. We would therefore have to manually review every record with the above sickness reasons for 2024. Based on figures previously researched, this would require a review of over 800 records of sick leave taken for psychological disorders. This would take in excess of 18 hours to complete.

Section 12 of the Act makes provision for public authorities to refuse requests for information where the cost of dealing with them would exceed the appropriate cost limit, which for police authorities is set at £450 or 18 staff hours. This represents the estimated cost of one person spending 2.5 working days in determining whether the department holds the information, locating, retrieving and extracting it.

This serves as a partial refusal notice under section 17(1) of the FOI Act.

As part of our section 16 obligation to assist you, we can advise that we may be able to provide some information that may be of use, we have been able to provide you with data for question 1. We are also able to provide this data broken down by the listed psychological disorders, subject to any exemptions.

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