Deirdre Francis is the Manager of Injury Management and WorkCover in the Victorian Police. She oversees the 22 staff working in the area, and manages the functions of both Workers’ Compensation Claims and Injury Management, primarily concerned with return to work following injury.

The main challenges centre around trying to return people to work in the police force, as “police don’t have opportunities to provide ‘non-operational positions’ for police returning to work,” Deirdre explained. “There’s a requirement for police when they’re at work to be fully operational, so trying to find alternate work or modified duties to bring people back to work is always a challenge. I think the view is that because you’re a large employer, that it should be easy.”

While there are additional roles in the force, police in operational roles tend to make up the major proportion of the injured workers, because they’re the major part of the workforce.  Deirdre said that there is the expectation, that if police are at work, then they’re operational, “so trying to modify traditional policing duties is complex and it can be difficult to facilitate return to work.” 

Another challenge is around the increasing prevalence of mental injury in the workers’ compensation scheme. Although the percentage of claims isn’t high compared to the physical claims, “the cost of the claims, driven by the length of time that people are absent from work is a critical factor for organisations such as Victoria Police,” Deirdre said.

Mental injury is also a more difficult area to assess.  Despite a lot of education in the community about the benefits of work to health, the major ‘treatment’ for people with compensable mental injury continues to be absence from the workplace. 

Victoria Police makes the accommodations they can in relation to the certifications they receive from treating practitioners. They try to facilitate these wherever possible. At their own cost, they also try to find alternate positions which don’t put people in the front line on their return to work. This can cause problems within the organisation however. Especially given the funding model that underpins police numbers. “If a police officer isn’t at work, you can’t just find another police officer to bring into to fill that position without creating gaps elsewhere…Absence from work in any capacity creates issues in being able to deliver the service of policing to the community,” Deirdre said.

They try to return people in modified operational positions, but it’s a task which is often complex. The kinds of mental health injuries they deal with, including Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, aren’t like sprains and strains – they don’t get better quickly, if at all. As a result, they’re often dealing with people who have long term and chronic illnesses in modified or alternate roles so they aren’t losing people who could still have productive work lives in the workforce.

During the very early stages of becoming a police officer, the candidates undergo a very rigorous selection process. Many people are selected out from the system at this stage as they’re not deemed to be psychologically suited to police work. Those who proceed through training are then rigorously overseen during their training course at the Police Academy, and the educators are very adept at identifying people even after acceptance who may not be psychologically resilient enough to be able to continue through to becoming confirmed police officers.

Much work is also done during the training to help recruits to build their resilience, to ensure that they have the most resilient people they can to send out into the front line. 

Further services are also available to assist them through any concern they have. They have their own in-house police psychology unit, police welfare unit, peer support and EAP and education around psychological wellbeing and personal management. The work hours and leave entitlements in the workforce enterprise agreement takes into account the needs of people to be away from the workplace and makes provision for managing shift patterns.

Deirdre also noted that policing and emergency service work is becoming more difficult in the community, given the types of problems in the community that Police & Emergency Service workers are confronted with on a day to day basis. They aren’t necessarily things which people who signed up to be police officers thought they might be involved in policing. 

With regard to physical injuries, there are similar problems. If people can’t be operational, in terms of running, jumping, sitting, standing and walking on a continuous basis, then restrictions cause some issues but they seem to be able to accommodate the physical injuries a lot more. This is mainly because they tend to be of a much shorter duration. Most of the physical injury claims tend to return to work within the first four to six weeks. Although they’re 80% to 90% of the injuries, they aren’t as much of a concern as they come back to work quite fast. It’s 20% that require the focus of current resources in Injury Management.

The physical injuries tend to be quite standard in most cases, generally sprains and strains, wear and tear, aggravations of pre-existing underlying degenerative conditions and so forth. Physical injuries also don’t tend to have the same ‘stigma’ in the medical profession. Deirdre noted that it’s rare for doctors to believe it to be a good idea for people with physical injuries to stay off work.

Police have been made safer in the workplace through the use of training and protective equipment body protection i.e the equipment vest, tasers, guns, capsicum spray, as well as receiving Operational Safety Tactics training. Police must re qualify in this training bi annually. One of the challenges with provision of protective equipment is that it has to be carried - the weight of the equipment people have to carry can contribute to injury, not in and of itself, but because of the tasks such as running, rolling, getting in and out of cars etc whilst carrying the equipment. Wherever possible, the Police provide the best equipment that is available. They do a great deal of research & committee approval before deciding on a particular piece of equipment and whether it should be carried on a regular basis.

Just about every police station in Victoria has a gymnasium set up for use by staff.

When asked whether she had a wish list for what she’d like to see occur in Victoria Police in the future, Deirdre replied that one of the major discussions both within the police and beyond is about working out “the gold standard approach to managing individuals who are diagnosed with PTSD. It’s becoming a big issue across the workers’ compensation scheme. It’s certainly a big issue at Victoria Police, not only from getting the diagnosis correct and the right treatment, right through to the return to work aspects. There seems to be very little known about or put into place by the scheme in regards to how to best diagnose, how to best manage and how to best treat in this particular area. So I think that if I had a wish list about anything, it would be about some gold standard approach mental injury for the workers’ compensation scheme in Victoria.”