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I am okay, convener. The questions that I wanted to ask have been covered.

That was a good answer.

You have started to answer my next question, because I was going to ask whose responsibility it is to initiate debriefs. Is it the responsibility of the management or the individual officer? What would happen if an officer who had dealt with a death, for example, said, “I’ve dealt with a really difficult situation this morning. I do not want to go out to anything else that’s potentially difficult or traumatic this afternoon”? What sort of response would that officer get from management?

The other side of it is the number of incidents that the police are dealing with, which is hard.

I have one more question, convener.

I do not know whether any of the witnesses caught the previous part of the session when I asked about thresholds for police officers’ daily work, and at what point such a threshold would kick in for management to say that a police officer had done too much that day—that is, that they have had to deal with too many things that could be considered to be traumatic—or for a police officer to say that. I got some good answers on that. Where would the line be for you and your management staff in saying that you cannot expect officers to do any more until they have had time to decompress?

Good morning. We are hearing, and there are indications, that staff absences because of psychological disorders are rising. Do you have any idea what the reason for that is? Has the nature of policing changed in recent years?

Good morning. As the convener said at the start of the meeting, we have been looking at these issues for a while. It has always struck me that, as has been referred to today, the police deal with almost everything, including the most difficult situations. I know that some of what they do involves plugging gaps in other services, which has been covered, but the police are always the first ones there for deaths, assaults and incidents involving children—the most horrific stuff that we can think of.

I want to ask about thresholds. When a police officer is dealing with something, is there a particular threshold? Do individual departments have a threshold? For example, if a police officer has to deal with a really difficult child protection issue, perhaps alongside social work or other services, do they get a debriefing afterwards, or do they just go on to do something else, such as dealing with an individual in a really difficult mental health situation? Are there thresholds that kick in, with officers being told, “You need to come in for a debriefing and not do anything else for the rest of the day”? Does that question make sense? Suzanne Smith is nodding, so I will go to her first.

Do other organisations or services deal with vicarious or impact trauma better than the police? Can lessons be learned in that regard? We are not here to talk about other services, because there are probably lots of concerns about those services, too, but could anything be learned from them?

You are right, and I was going to come to that issue. Experience tells us that people react differently, and many people will not respond to the traumatic event right away—that is not the normal reaction. People can react sometime in the future, and, depending on the nature of the incident, the reaction can be significant.

I have a rough idea on monitoring, but I know that it probably cannot be done like this. Is any work being done on all the processes that you have spoken about to record the number of incidents that officers attend? Are the three types of incidents that you mentioned, chief constable, being logged? Does someone then pull the person in and say, “You’ve actually had quite a tough year”? Is anything like that being done?

Do I have time for one more question?