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After attending the @PolicingReview webinar this morning, here's a short thread on why #resilience isn't the answer to police (or any Blue Light) wellbeing because you can't ask individuals to be resilient when the organisations are unable to be so themselves.
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For basic wellbeing, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs says we need food/water/sleep which given cancelled rest days, shift work (with often bad set patterns) & non-protected ref breaks (esp in police), these basic needs are not being met on a regular basis 2/
We then require safety (stability) in our home/work lives & whilst Blue Lights don't tend to face redundancies, given the constant threat of standards dept or IOPC (police) investigations, high turnover in job roles, many have an anxious attachment to the Job therefore unsafe 3/
Though ambo/fire tend to work as small units & there is the 'Thin Blue Line' of police, many will have strong friendships & sense of belonging to teams but not the entire organisation so whilst it's advertised as a 'family' it's a dysfunctional one which can easily ostracise 4/
All Blue Lights but especially police have a blame culture under the guise of public accountability & highlight the importance of teams meaning there is less effort put into nurturing personal self-esteem despite feeling chronically undervalued & appreciated by leaders/the Job 5/
The basic principle of resilience is that it requires time to process trauma which our Blue Lights don't have esp in austerity with less people for more workloads. You can't ask individuals to be more resilient when our Blue Light organisations are on the knees in austerity 6/
The reason resilience training is so popular with senior leaders is because it's promoted as coping mechanisms but everyone can be afforded healthy coping mechanisms when you have a strong work/life balance which is why there's such a divide in how wellbeing is viewed 7/
The senior leaders who promote RT often won't have been frontline operational within austerity measures so they don't understand the realities of today's policing. Their roles allow them a better routine encouraging strong work/life balance & meeting their needs 8/
If you want to connect with the frontline, stop exclusively running RT & instead promote coping mechanisms whilst ALSO recognising "this will help up to 60% of the time but we know 40% are organisational issues" such as demand & capacity. Promoting RT alienates the frontline 9/
Coping mechanisms within RT are vital but we have to be realistic about how effective such mechanisms will be given organisational causality & austerity. Resilience is just another way to blame an individual for not coping against issues that prevent them from being so 10/
I'm not against resilience, I am against the exclusive insistence on it. If we're not helping people meet their basic (!) needs to function as humans, we have no right to demand more from them than we are willing to give. End. https://forourmen.com/things-that-go-bump-in-the-night/
