Absolutely. This is a significant challenge to us. At the moment we are not working enough with key partners. We need to engage the health sector far, far more than we have in relation to resolving these issues with some of the most vulnerable people we come across.
There are some pockets of good examples. In my own force, we have community psychiatric nurses who work within our custody areas. When a person comes into custody with clear mental health issues, they can have an immediate referral to a mental health professional. We also are looking for those psychiatric nurses to provide telephone support to officers who are at an incident and dealing with somebody who clearly has mental health issues. That may be somebody who is contemplating suicide or who is in serious distress.
I would like to move to how we think about actually deploying mental health professionals alongside police officers to incidents that would benefit from their expertise. Far too often our communities now are relying on police officers to do things they are simply not trained to do.