Working for health.

HM Prison Service

PA Consulting Group
The HM Prison Service has 48,000 employees. The workforce is made up of prison officers, managers, administrative, maintenance and catering staff who provide a 24 hour service in establishments across the UK.

"The Prison Service reduced sickness absence by 25% between 2002 and 2006 to 11.5 days per employee per annum. This amounts to a £38 million cost saving"

HM Prison statue

Why did we address workplace health?

In 1998 our absence rates were running at 15.9 days per employee per annum. The Public Accounts Committee and the Audit Office were both critical of this rate of absence. These external pressures helped us focus on changing our approach to workplace health.

What did we do?

We developed robust administrative procedures for short term absence:

  • We researched best practice short-term absence management
  • We introduced a new absence policy to deal with short-term absence based on the Bradford Factor. This calculates the length of absence and the frequency of absence and highlights the ‘most disruptive’ cases of short-term absence
  • We invested in an IT infrastructure which helped us develop robust administrative procedures for short term absence, by:
    • generating reports on sickness absence for prison managers to help them see the impact that short-term sickness was having on their operation
    • identifying staff, who have hit a specific ‘trigger’ and generating an absence warning to them
    • providing safeguards for employees with serious conditions and disabilities to ensure these employees do not receive a warning
  • We gained agreement from all recognised trade unions

 

We developed a care and support package for those with health problems at work:

  • We developed the occupational health and support services for the most common causes of long-term absence – stress and musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs). Stress and MSDs account for 50% of all days lost in the Prison Service. The new approach was designed to provide a timely and independent response:
    • Day one referrals for both of these conditions (with 20-day referrals for all other conditions)
    • A case conference approach to enabling the employee back to work in both instances
  • We appointed in-house staff care and welfare professionals in each prison who can refer employees to accredited counselling services

 

We developed a series of interventions to promote health and well-being, including mandatory health check-ups for all staff.


What was the impact?

  • The Prison Service reduced sickness absence by 25% between 2002 and 2006 to 11.5 days per employee per annum. This amounts to a £38 million cost saving
  • In 2004, the National Audit Office quoted the Prison Service as an example of good practice in the reduction of absence
  • The reduction in sickness absence over the past two years has released the equivalent of 181 officers back into front line service each day