Waiting to break

According to the College of Policing, the average officer will experience between 400 and 600 traumatic events over the course of their career.

But those serving with the Police Service of Northern Ireland face an additional set of stressors: the knowledge that their job itself can make them a target, even within their own community. It all amounts to a standing source of anxiety that is impossible to switch off. Which makes it all the more surprising that the PSNI has no structured way of screening officers and staff for psychological harm before it happens.

That gap sits at the centre of a wider set of findings on PSNI’s approach to workforce well-being, published today by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS) — and it exposes an uncomfortable truth: forces in England and Wales can access funding specifically to support psychological screening. PSNI cannot.

The National Police Wellbeing Service, known as Oscar Kilo, has identified which roles carry the greatest risk of psychological harm and recommends continual assessment and targeted preventative support for people working in them. At the time of the inspection, PSNI had none of that in place for anyone.

Inspectors were blunt about the funding gap behind all this. The service has identified the risk, built the case, and simply doesn’t have access to the money that its counterparts across the Irish Sea are able to draw on for the same purpose.

Under threat

The force is already paying the price. Between 2020 and 2025, average officer sickness absence very nearly doubled, from 11.17 to 21.91 days a year, and more than half of that — 52.8 per cent — was linked to psychological factors. Referrals to the occupational health unit rose by over 1,000 cases annually across the same period. Ill-health retirement applications relating to post-traumatic stress disorder are, inspectors say, a growing trend. Anyone referred for mental health support currently waits four months to be seen.

That is down from over a year in previous inspections, pointing to genuine, hard-won progress, but it is still four months for someone whose job has already started to break something in them.

Recent years have seen an uptick in events likely to challenge even the most resilient individuals. In August 2023, a PSNI data breach published the personal details of more than 9,000 serving officers and staff online, later confirmed to have reached dissident republicans.

In March this year, a delivery driver was hijacked at gunpoint and forced to drive a device to Lurgan police station, forcing the evacuation of a hundred homes overnight. Five weeks later, in April, a near-identical attack outside Dunmurry police station saw a device planted in a hijacked car exploded as officers evacuated the building.

The New IRA claimed both, stated explicitly that the intention at Dunmurry was to kill officers as they left the station, and then announced its intention to begin targeting officers in their own homes. In June, twelve officers were injured over two nights of rioting in Belfast that followed a violent street stabbing, with crews facing bricks, petrol bombs and, at one point, water cannon deployed to hold a line in Newtownabbey.

This is the operating environment the report describes — one where, as inspectors note, “service personnel continue to be under threat from terrorist groups” and communities in some areas remain unwilling to work with police for fear of reprisals. It is not new. But it is also not slowing down, and it sits on top of, rather than instead of, the everyday trauma exposure the report is actually measuring.

The strain isn’t confined to what officers carry home in their heads, either. A separate report by the House of Commons Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, published five weeks before this inspection, heard that some officers’ families have been “ostracised” because of their connection to the service, and that a number have relocated for their own safety. More strikingly, the Committee was told that some serving officers and staff cannot share details of their employment with family and friends at all. That is a different kind of weight to the trauma exposure HMICFRS was measuring: not what an officer has seen, but what they are unable to say, to the people closest to them, about who they are.

Support tools

It would be unfair to suggest that the PSNI has ignored the problem. The service has recorded workforce psychological well-being as a strategic risk on its own corporate risk register, a designation that requires senior leadership sign-off and ongoing scrutiny. It has built a CARE framework combining psychological education, self-assessment, training and support tools. Its Modified Group Traumatic Episode Protocol, a peer-led intervention for personnel who have experienced traumatic events, was highly commended at the 2025 Oscar Kilo awards and has demonstrably reduced distress, anxiety and PTSD symptoms among those who have used it.

The force’s “Watch Your Wellbeing” initiative won the Healthy Living category at the same awards. Its “Supporting Those That Serve” programme, which helps officers’ families understand the pressures of policing in Northern Ireland and how to support their loved ones, was runner-up in the Families and Leavers category, a rare and useful acknowledgement that trauma exposure doesn’t stop at the front door.

There is also a self-assessment app, ME, offering peer support, physiotherapy and cognitive behavioural therapy referrals. However, HMICFRS found that not everyone in the service had even heard of it, and that those who had tended to prefer speaking to someone from occupational health in person rather than opening an app.

What the service has not built, despite having identified the need, is any way of catching harm before it happens rather than treating it once it has. Preventative screening in the form of assessing someone’s psychological state before they take on a high-risk role, and periodically while they remain in it, is a different exercise from offering support once someone has already broken down or asked for help. It requires officers to be seen as at risk by default, not only once they self-identify as struggling. HMICFRS’s own language leaves little room for interpretation: without it, the workforce is “at greater risk of harm.”

Two more cognitive behavioural therapists are due to join the service’s well-being team by the middle of this year, which the force hopes will bring referral waiting times down to three months. It will be a genuine improvement but will not answer the more basic question the inspection leaves hanging: why a service operating in one of the more dangerous policing environments in the United Kingdom, doing so with fewer officers than it needs and no clear date for when that will change, remains unable to access the funding that would let it get ahead of potential harm.

A standard PSNI has no route into

Days after HMICFRS’s inspection was completed, the National Police Wellbeing Service (Oscar Kilo) published new national guidance on suicide prevention for forces in England and Wales. “Staying Safe from Suicide” sets out a biopsychosocial framework and a tiered risk management standard for assessing and reducing suicide risk among officers and staff, built around the same recognition of cumulative trauma exposure that runs through the PSNI inspection.

The guidance is tied to the Police Reform White Paper, which named suicide prevention one of six priority areas for mandatory wellbeing standards across policing in England and Wales, with Oscar Kilo named as the national delivery partner.

PSNI, as a Northern Ireland service, sits outside that framework. The same funding gap that leaves the force unable to introduce psychological screening for high-risk roles also leaves it without a route into a national standard its counterparts across the Irish Sea will shortly be expected to meet.