Mental health needs assessed in custody

Kent and Medway NHS and Social Care Partnership Trust introduced the pilot project with the intention of reducing the detention of people for assessment in custody under section 136 of the Mental Health Act.

The project involves mental health nurses accompanying police officers on callouts and assessing whether the apprehended person could require mental health treatment rather than criminal sanctions. Since its launch in October, 74 people have been given assessments.

The trust’s police custody liaison and diversion service also works with offenders to assess their mental health needs. It was introduced in 2009 amid complaints, highlighted by the Bradley report, that offenders with mental health issues were not receiving the care they required.

Clinical leads are based at police stations across Kent so they can assess suspected offenders’ mental health needs and create patient care pathways.

Over the last year the service has seen 1,347 people in custody. Of them, 47 per cent were recommended for health, social care or substance misuse treatment.

Michael Kingham, the service’s clinical lead, said:  “We’re getting people into secondary care. We’re able to liaise with GPs to make sure offenders are not lost in the system and there are admissions to inpatient facilities and for crisis treatment whereas before we would not have had an opportunity to assess the detained person and stage an intervention.”

The presence of clinical staff at magistrates’ courts has also resulted in a change in sentencing of offenders with mental health needs, Dr Kingham claims.

He said: “We’ve found that there’s a much greater take-up of mental health treatment requirements by the court. So they’re actually sentencing people to community orders which have a mental health treatment requirement attached.”