Againstthewind
Victory
- Jul 10, 2022
- 230
So to sum up Mark Rowley says he will order his officers not to attend thousands of calls they get every year to deal with mental health incidents. He believes the move is necessary and urgent because officers are being diverted from their core role of fighting crime (even though they do a shit job of that too) and patients who need medical experts are being failed when a police officer attends instead. Rowley has given health and social care services a deadline of 31 August before the force starts its ban, which will only be waived if a threat to life is feared. Rowley's letter to the Met's health and social care partners was sent on 24 May, giving them a 99-day deadline to plan for the change. Police and health chiefs have been talking about relieving the mental health burden on police under a new national scheme called right care, right person (RCRP).
The plan could cause consternation among ambulance workers, paramedics and NHS staff who are already under pressure because of cuts and at a time when mental health services are already stretched.
Here is the letter he wrote to health and social care partners;
"I have asked my team that the Met introduce RCRP this summer and withdraw from health-related calls by no later than 31 August. I appreciate this may be challenging, but for the reasons I have set out above, the status quo is untenable. It is important to stress the urgency of implementing RCRP in London. Every day that we permit the status quo to remain we are collectively failing patients and are not setting officers up to succeed. In fact, we are failing Londoners twice. We are failing them first by sending police officers, not medical professionals, to those in mental health crisis, and expecting them to do their best in circumstances where they are not the right people to be dealing with the patient. We are failing Londoners a second time by taking large amounts of officer time away from preventing and solving crime, as well as dealing properly with victims, in order to fill gaps for others."
The letter cites data from a national police study that says officers spend almost a million hours a year waiting in hospitals for mental health patients to be assessed, the equivalent of attending 500,000 domestic abuse incidents or 600,000 burglaries."
Rowley claims in his letter that Met police officers spend 10,000 hours a month dealing with mental health issues, and that it takes up to 14 hours to hand a patient over to medical staff.
In what amounts to a broadside against the health service, he also says there are scores of cases a month in which his officers are called when patients waiting for treatment walk out and are reported missing.
RCRP (Right care, right person) was an innovation from Humberside, where after a year of tense negotiations police and health services reached an agreement under which many mental health calls are dealt with by health professionals rather than officers. The government wants the scheme to be rolled out across the country, but health chiefs would argue that austerity measures have left them short of the resources to cope with the demands for mental health services, with police effectively becoming a makeshift mental health service.
Let this not be a story where they believe they are overworked because they go to these mental health emergencies, people have campaigned against them NOT going because as we all know they make things 10 times worse. NOW they will stop this, as you notice not to make things better for the general population for those to be dealt with by the right people, but because THEY complain that it takes the time away from the crime (that they fail to fight, once again they were always shit). Ambulance wait times, psych wards, the general MH services in the UK is just burning ash from a destroyed system. Remember the Met remains in special measures because of a litany of failings.
The plan could cause consternation among ambulance workers, paramedics and NHS staff who are already under pressure because of cuts and at a time when mental health services are already stretched.
Here is the letter he wrote to health and social care partners;
"I have asked my team that the Met introduce RCRP this summer and withdraw from health-related calls by no later than 31 August. I appreciate this may be challenging, but for the reasons I have set out above, the status quo is untenable. It is important to stress the urgency of implementing RCRP in London. Every day that we permit the status quo to remain we are collectively failing patients and are not setting officers up to succeed. In fact, we are failing Londoners twice. We are failing them first by sending police officers, not medical professionals, to those in mental health crisis, and expecting them to do their best in circumstances where they are not the right people to be dealing with the patient. We are failing Londoners a second time by taking large amounts of officer time away from preventing and solving crime, as well as dealing properly with victims, in order to fill gaps for others."
The letter cites data from a national police study that says officers spend almost a million hours a year waiting in hospitals for mental health patients to be assessed, the equivalent of attending 500,000 domestic abuse incidents or 600,000 burglaries."
Rowley claims in his letter that Met police officers spend 10,000 hours a month dealing with mental health issues, and that it takes up to 14 hours to hand a patient over to medical staff.
In what amounts to a broadside against the health service, he also says there are scores of cases a month in which his officers are called when patients waiting for treatment walk out and are reported missing.
RCRP (Right care, right person) was an innovation from Humberside, where after a year of tense negotiations police and health services reached an agreement under which many mental health calls are dealt with by health professionals rather than officers. The government wants the scheme to be rolled out across the country, but health chiefs would argue that austerity measures have left them short of the resources to cope with the demands for mental health services, with police effectively becoming a makeshift mental health service.
Let this not be a story where they believe they are overworked because they go to these mental health emergencies, people have campaigned against them NOT going because as we all know they make things 10 times worse. NOW they will stop this, as you notice not to make things better for the general population for those to be dealt with by the right people, but because THEY complain that it takes the time away from the crime (that they fail to fight, once again they were always shit). Ambulance wait times, psych wards, the general MH services in the UK is just burning ash from a destroyed system. Remember the Met remains in special measures because of a litany of failings.
