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Emergency Calls: Mental Health

Answer

The Right Care Right Person (RCRP) approach sets out a threshold to assist police decision making on responding to incidents based on a duty of care. The benefits of this are that the police should only be responding to health & social care incidents where there is a clear and immediate risk of serious harm or criminality or where they are needed to exercise their powers under the Mental Health Act. This ensures the public receive the right care from the right person and reduces unnecessary police involvement.

The Right Care Right Person operational model is a locally led approach with decisions on how and when to implement it to be made at a local level, between operationally independent police forces and health care partners. These will be based on different local area needs and requirements. This approach does not change the police response to situations where a crime has occurred or where there is a risk of serious harm to the individual or the wider public.

This is a model that is based on partnership working, with local police chiefs and health and social care partners working together to understand where the police are filling gaps for other agencies and the route to address this. It will be important for partners to continue to work together, to safely implement the approach.

It will be for local chiefs to decide which aspects of RCRP that their force will adopt, working with partners, and they will need to ensure that they properly consider equality impacts and risks as part of that process.

As required by the Equality Act 2010, the Home Office is considering its Public Sector Equality Duties, as part of our work with health and policing partners to create a new national partnership agreement, which will signal national support for the RCRP principles.

The recent HMICFRS State of Policing Report viewed the implementation of RCRP as a positive step in the report and strongly supported this approach which further builds on the findings made in Humberside’s PEEL inspection report last year.

Secondary information

Type

Written question

Reference

189717

Session

2022-23

Grouped for answer

Yes

Subjects

Emergency services Emergency calls Mental health Community safety partnerships

Link

View this Written question on www.parliament.uk