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We in policing experience several hundred traumatic events in our working life, whereas a general member of the public might experience one or two. It’s vital that the culture of an organisation, the leadership of the organisation and the interventions and support that organisation has got are all lined up.

It’s such a big issue wellbeing that, you know, some people don’t know where to start. Oscar Kilo, the National Wellbeing Service, gives you a framework to start planning, whether it’s in your office, your department, your division, your whole force. Our goal is to provide world class support for those people who work in the incredibly and challenging environment of law enforcement policing in this country.

One of the great things about wellbeing is that there’s a huge community of people out there, people who do tons of stuff around wellbeing on top of their day job, because they care passionately about it. By having workshops with those professionals we will bring into that research, knowledge, good practice, make sure if there’s more research needs to be done we can get it done and rapidly turn it into good stuff on the frontline. Those workshops have been really successful, it’s brought those professionals together and their information has helped inform where we take the service next, as well.

The vans are a big part of what we have always wanted to achieve in Oscar Kilo, that is getting out and about to the people who are often overlooked, those hard to reach people, the ones who are doing the vital work on the frontline. We’ve had over 10,000 people so far go through the vans getting physical health checks, psychological health checks, it’s had a massive impact already wherever those vans have gone. We have now got a fleet of ten vehicles, we’ve got fleet management that will rotate those vehicles around the country and the ability to go out and meet people actually where they work.

So it’s all about prevention and to do prevention well you’ve got to go and park your vehicles up where people work, put on a cup of tea, put some cakes on and invite people in. Our objective is there’s over 200,000 people work in policing, for every single one of those people to have seen those vans and had the offer to go and have a health check.

We want to take our fleet of vehicles out, not just do health checks with them but also deliver training at operational bases using the latest technology with the latest research to create the type of environment where people are not just coming to work to survive their day, their shift, but they are here thriving in what is an incredibly exciting, interesting and meaningful job.

Wellbeing in policing is here to stay. The National Wellbeing Service is part and parcel of the driving force behind changing our culture, improving our services and, most importantly of all, listening to the people who actually do the work to find out what it is that needs to be done so that they can continue delivering a fantastic service to the public.

I’ve been a call handler in the police communications room for 32 years, I take a range of calls on a daily basis from suicide attempts to armed robberies. I took a telephone call from a gentleman who’d witnessed a bus with a motorcyclist underneath it. The gentleman was obviously quite upset on the phone, I’m obviously getting the ambulance, getting the fire brigade, my colleagues are all working in conjunction with me.

The informant was saying to me, there’s a man trying to pull the motorcyclist out and I’m saying, well, who is he because, obviously, my concerns was, would he cause damage to him because we didn’t know whether he had first aid training this man. So, basically, he was an off duty fireman, he knew what he was doing and he was shouting saying, I’m going to have to pull him out. So he was pulling him out, the informant was telling me the motorcyclist was in a lot of pain.

The police arrived at scene and the police officer shouted the gentleman was deceased and I just burst into tears. And then you start questioning, have you done enough, did you get somebody there quick enough. That still upsets me because some family has had the most historic new son that day, but there’s nothing I can do about that, it’s just one of those things that we have to deal with on a daily basis. We have to deal with life and death, unfortunately.

Luckily, in my job we get a lot of support because we all deal with the same thing and we all deal with traumatic incidents and your colleagues do support you. You know, I don’t think you’ll ever find colleagues like you do in the police, to be fair.

At home I’m married to my husband, who is also a police officer, and we have two young children. The four year old was diagnosed with autism about 18 months/ two years ago. Quite often both of us could come to work after having absolutely no sleep, which is a challenge because then you’ve got to come to work and do what is a very stressful job in itself whilst dealing with distresses at home.

When we were going through the diagnosis stages that was very stressful in itself, but it also involved an awful lot of appointments with different specialist. And it is quite a private thing and initially you think first of all it’s nothing to do with work so why should work have to assist me in that, like, you don’t want to put on an organisation that’s already stretched.

I was really quite fortunate in that when I was going through that stage I had an extremely supportive inspector and he made it quite clear that whatever we needed he was there to support us, and he did. If I needed time off he would let me change my shift to suit what our requirements were at the time with appointments. So I would say, you know, it is well and truly worth having that sit down conversation with your supervisor because the support is there, even though perhaps you think it’s not.