Public Accounts Committee: The proposals under discussion with the Prison Officers' Association to move to an annualised hours system for overtime is likely to have a positive impact on sick leave in the Prison Service, the secretary general of the Department of Justice, Mr Tim Dalton, said yesterday.
Mr Dalton was addressing the Public Accounts Committee on the Comptroller and Auditor General's report on the management of sick leave in the Prison Service. He said the system for counting the level of sick absence tended to exaggerate the true level of absence by comparison with the rest of the Civil Service.
This was because of rostering for to ensure cover 24 hours a day, seven days a week, which meant that prison officers could work for seven days and then have four days off.
If an officer became ill at the end of the seven-day period, the four days could end up counted as sick days as well, even though the officer was not due to work them.There were two prongs to dealing with the problem of sick leave, Mr Dalton said. The first was the caring side - finding out why the prison officer was sick and helping him or her to deal with any problems that might contribute to it. The other was the disciplinary side, where those who persistently took days off faced disciplinary measures like financial penalties.
"The level of attention paid to the caring side was not sufficient in the past," he said.
Mr John Dennehy (FF) said the committee report stated that 24 per cent of sick leave was due to injuries. The director of the Prison Service, Mr Sean Aylward, said that these included injuries playing football and from car crashes.
Referring to the question of disciplinary action for excessive sick leave, he said that four officers resigned in 2003 at the point of dismissal, and procedures were in train against seven others.