COMMENT
Street triage, stations and suicide
Mark Smith, head of suicide prevention and mental health for the British Transport Police, talks to PSE about a street triage partnership between the police and the NHS.
W
hile policing and health have clearly defi ned remits, their responsibility
crosses over on certain key issues. This includes mental health, and people who are vulnerable to self-harm or suicide.
Often these people are identifi ed by the police rather than the NHS, but specialist knowledge about the best place for referral, current services used by the patient, and the type of risk they may pose has previously been siloed away from the front-line.
A new project seeks to bridge this gap by bringing together police forces and mental health nurses. Closer working and better communication have a signifi cant role to play in improving treatment of people with mental health issues and ensuring this treatment is standardised across the country.
Police pilots National relationships
At the end of August, the Department of Health announced funding to extend this street triage scheme; bringing mental health nursing staff and police offi cers together to improve the management of vulnerable people.
It follows trials in Cleveland and Leicestershire and forms part of a larger DH and Home Offi ce plan on policing and mental health. Five pilots were launched with the British Transport Police (BTP) and the Metropolitan, Thames Valley, West Midlands and West Yorkshire forces. They join existing pilots in Derbyshire, Devon & Cornwall, North Yorkshire and Sussex.
Announcing the fund, care minister Norman 24 | public sector executive Sep/Oct 13
The funding has allowed the BTP to extend an existing pilot in London, where offi cers have been working with community psychiatric nurses in Barnet, Enfi eld and Haringey Mental Health Trust.
The team screens everyone brought into BTP custody suites and ensures any mental health issues are identifi ed and picked up early. The nurses help the BTP to make decisions around what happens to these people, and provides the police with an advocate in the health service.
PSE spoke to Mark Smith, head of suicide prevention at the BTP, about the need for
Lamb MP said: “In some areas the police already do an excellent job in terms of their handling of situations involving people with mental health problems and work well with health colleagues to make sure that mentally ill people in crisis get the care and attention they need, but we need to make that the reality everywhere.
“We are launching these pilots to make sure that people with mental health issues get the right care, at the right time and in the right place.
“We know the barriers often lie at the crossroads between police and health services.
“That is why we are working with the Home Offi ce and leaders of the police to look at how we can improve services for the very vulnerable people involved.”
closer working between policing and health. He said: “As a national police force, it’s not very easy to build one-to-one relationships on a geographical basis.
“If you’re a borough based police force, you’ve got borough based health services and you can form some good relationships. Trying to do that nationally is very diffi cult.”
Breaking through the brick wall
That national focus means the NHS staff are invaluable for the BTP team, providing up-to- date information about the risks people could pose, what services they are currently accessing and the best place to refer them.
“They provide that overview as well,” Smith said. “Sometimes we might be thinking about detaining [someone] under section 136 – the mental health professional’s view might be different, and they might give us some information about how to proceed.”
One BTP policy is to put anyone who comes to their notice for attempted suicide onto a plan to get professional support.
But without the NHS link, they have been “hitting a bit of a brick wall” around data protection, and knowing the right place and right people to speak to.
“These individuals can do in minutes what it would previously take us days to do. It’s been highly successful in helping us to manage the risk in relation to the individuals who come to our notice, which is a considerable number.”
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