A review of controversial changes to the way the emergency services in North Yorkshire and York respond to calls over mental health concerns is set to be held later this year amid concerns people in crisis are “falling between the cracks”.
Senior council and mayoral combined authority figures are set to meet with their NHS and police counterparts in the autumn to examine the impact of North Yorkshire Police’s Right Care, Right Person model, launched last year to ensure vulnerable people get the right response and police resources were best used.
After the initiative to hand responsibility to mental health care providers, NHS representatives, local authorities and the ambulance service was rolled out, charities dedicated to supporting vulnerable people said they had not been consulted by the force.
They said North Yorkshire Police had stopped doing any welfare checks on vulnerable adults when asked to do so, sparking concerns over who would “pick up the slack”.
Mental health charity Mind said it would be “simply impossible to take a million hours of support out of the system without replacing it with investment and mental health services”.
On Thursday, a meeting of the North Yorkshire Police, Fire and Crime Panel heard concerns over the crisis care response for individuals with complex mental health needs, with claims the necessary investment had not happened.
The panel was told a young man from Harrogate, who was known to social services, had been met with an armed police response.
Bilton and Nidd Gorge division councillor Paul Haslam had raised the case of the resident being arrested at his home by armed police for issuing public threats over social media, despite his mother having attempted to alert the NHS mental health crisis team to an escalation in his behaviour.
Coun Haslam said just two weeks after being released the young man had been arrested by police again over similar alleged offences, before finally being “made safe” and detained under the Mental Health Act for up to 28 days.
He said: “We believe this is not an isolated case where things have fallen through the cracks. It’s a waste of resource and not good for the person either.
“There was no way of alerting authorities that things were getting out of control. It should never have happened, but then it should have been sorted the first time it happened.
“I don’t think you can walk away from a situation where you’ve been responsible unless the other partners have picked up the pace.”
Panel members called for the bodies including the police to provide evidence to prove if the model was working and questioned whether there was sufficient support for the police at all times of the day.
Panel member and Malton councillor Lindsay Burr said: “Right person right care model has been discussed many many times and nothing has been done about it.”
Deputy mayor police, fire and crime Jo Coles said she wanted to see a “shift to a more preventative space”.
She added: “Obviously it is not ideal to have people in mental health crisis facing a police response when actually what they need is probably a trauma-informed health response.”
Deputy chief constable Scott Bisset said the force already examined peaks in demand for such alerts.
He said: “It is important to remeber what the initiative is really about – getting the right person to a person in crisis – and that very often is not police officers.
“In fact in more cases than not it’s more destructive for a police officer to attend that and I think it’s a well known fact that mental health services have suffered from under-investment over the years, and that is the line we are trying to tread very carefully.”
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