Police-related triage interventions for mental health-related incidents
Citation: Rodgers M, Thomas EW, Dalton JE, et al. Police-related triage interventions for mental health-related incidents: a rapid evidence synthesis. Health Services and Delivery Research. 2019;7(20):1-161.
Language: Abstract, plain language summary and full text available in EN.
Free to view: Yes.
Funding sources: National Institute for Health Research Health Services and Delivery Research Programme (UK).
What is this? Police officers are often frontline responders to emergency mental health crisis calls and may need to take appropriate approaches to triage mental-health incidents. Evidence on this might help with the development of resilient health systems.
In this rapid evidence synthesis, the authors searched for UK studies of police-related mental health triage interventions in emergency situations and related systematic reviews (but without any geographic restrictions on the studies in those reviews). They restricted their searches to articles published in English since 2016 and did the search in November 2017. They included 5 systematic reviews, and 8 qualitative and 8 quantitative studies.
What was found: There is limited research evaluating the effects of police-related mental health triage interventions, but this suggests that where police officers worked alongside mental health professionals, they were often valued and there was positive improvement in procedures and resources.
Similarly, police staff valued police-related mental health triage interventions.
Critical factors in the implementation of these models are the timing in which a mental health professional is deployed to the scene of the incident, access to health records, managing the disproportionately high demand created by some repeat service users, strong partnerships and information sharing between police and healthcare services, clear accountability and responsibility among staff and availability of health professional support.
Implications: The authors of the review concluded that the successful implementation of these models depends on the integration of criminal justice and mental health services.
Other considerations: The authors of the review discussed their findings in the context of place of residence, ethnicity, language, occupation, gender, education, social capital, age, disability and time-dependent relationships (first point of care).
This summary was prepared by Yasmeen Saeed, checked by Ana Pizarro and Cristián Mansilla, and finalized by Mike Clarke.