Peel Regional Police recognize and value our personnel as being vital to our success and ensuring the safety of those who work and play in our community. We recognize it is so important to take care of the people who are taking care of the community.
In 2008 we established an organizational wellness bureau. We know that creating a healthy workplace is a commitment to a journey and not just a destination. The mandate of the organizational wellness bureau is aligned with strategic goals, namely a member-focused workplace. This simply means that we want to ensure the health and the well-being of our employees.
In our organizational wellness bureau we have a staff sergeant in charge, and currently he overseas a health nurse, a fitness coordinator, a wellness coordinator, a chaplain coordinator, an early intervention strategy coordinator, as well as an addiction coordinator.
Among the health and the wellness resources that we provide in Peel Regional Police to our employees, we have a chaplaincy program. We have five chaplains who provide on-site spiritual counselling. We also provide on-site access to massage therapy, chiropractic care, physiotherapy, dental hygiene, and dietitian services. We also provide access to legal, financial, and family support services, as well as health-coaching services, with naturopathic and nutritional support.
We have a safeguarding program, which is mandated within Peel Police. I ensure that my officers attend annual psychological assessments. These are for the employees who work in the Internet childhood exploitation unit. We're now currently expanding this to include other units, such as the tech crimes unit, the special victims unit, the major collision bureau, our organizational wellness bureau, our homicide bureau, the communications staff who dispatch all the calls, the forensic identification unit, our courts unit, and our major drugs and vice unit.
We have 84 members who are peer support. We've had a peer support team for over 30 years in Peel.
We do educational “lunch and learns” entitled “Boosting Your Positive Outlook” or “Coping with Teenagers” or “Dealing with Seasonal Stress”. These are all designed to offer coping strategies to our employees to help them reduce their stress.
We provide wellness family nights at which we educate families on what to expect and how to prepare and support their loved ones in our stress-filled life.
We also have a database that is an early intervention system. This is a system that tracks prospective risk indicators and flags opportunities for early intervention. It tracks public complaints, use-of-force incidents, internal affairs investigations, our sick time, and exposure to some tragic calls, such as fatal motor vehicle collisions, attending a child death scene, or suicides.
We have 12 members who are assigned to a critical incident response team. They go out and deal with situations. They do debriefings after exposure to serious and/or tragic circumstances.
We also provide a directory of health professionals, and we have a return to work program.
In 2015 we launched our road to mental readiness, R2MR, training, which is mandated training for all employees at all levels in my organization. It's not only helping them understand mental health issues in themselves and co-workers, but is also a stigma-reducing program designed to teach coping mechanisms, acceptance and support of co-workers, as well as strengthening personal resilience. To date we have trained more than 2,600 employees, including 23 of my senior officers.
This is a program, I'm sure you're aware, that was initially created by the Canadian military. After years of trying to use the program to benefit municipal police officers, we were finally permitted to use similar training.
One request that I would respectfully ask is that this committee identify ways to allow training material to pass from the federal government, i.e., the military, to provincial and municipal agencies that could benefit.
I understand that police agencies were only allowed to begin using the R2MR because the Canadian Mental Health Association became the conduit in which to transfer the knowledge. I can tell you that we're hearing really positive feedback as a result of this training.