Ambulance callouts for ‘pyschiatric’ incidents doubled
AMBULANCE callouts for psychiatric incidents in the West Midlands has almost DOUBLED in just five years.
Data revealed that the total number of such incidents has increased year on year since 2012.
In total, the West Midlands Ambulance Service (WMAS) were called to 25,291 incidents classified as ‘psychiatric’ between April 2016 and March 2017.
The increase from 2012/13 to 2016/17 is significant, with the number of incidents rising by 11,357 in five years. Despite the dramatic increase, Murray MacGregor, WMAS’s Communications Director believes there to be a good reason for the rise.
He said: “Mental health now has a much higher profile, which is a good thing.
“People have realised that a stiff upper lip is not the right answer.”
The data, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act revealed that there have been 95,002 psychiatric incidents across the last five years.
The data suggests that there were an average of 69 psychiatric incidents each day last year, though not all were attended to by an ambulance, thanks to a new pilot scheme launched by WMAS. Mr MacGregor explained: “We have two mental health cars which attend incidents, containing a police officer, a paramedic and a mental health nurse. “We’ve worked on solutions which allow us to deal with incidents more effectively, and it frees up ambulance crews. “It’s better than police officers attending incidents, which can result in patients being sectioned and ending up in police cells, which is wholly innapropriate.”
Overall, the total number of incidents has increased across the same five year period, with 835,551 incidents in total in the 16/17 period. This works out to a daily average of 2,289 incidents across the West Midlands, and Mr MacGregor estimates that 95% of these result in an ambulance being dispatched.
Mental health charity Mind was approached for comment.