Marlborough Express - Weekend Express
Joint approach to mental health calls
Better preventive mental health services in Marlborough would help to ease the workload for police busy with related 111 calls in the region, police say.
Tasman police district commander Superintendent Tracey Thompson said mental health callouts for police in the region were coming from the same small proportion of people, and said police were experiencing “increased call for services per capita for mental health [in Marlborough]”.
Each mental health callout in Marlborough involved at least three hours of police time, Thompson said.
Marlborough did not have the same level of preventive services as the Nelson Bays area, Thompson said.
The Nelson Bays area, Marlborough and Tasman fall under the Tasman police district, as does the West Coast.
Nationally, such calls take up a chunk of police resources. Data released under the Official Information Act showed that during the five years between January 1, 2018, and October 1, last year, police around the country attended 199,425 mental health and suiciderelated events in total, or an average of almost 40,000 a year.
In the top of the south, police attended 2413 such callouts in Marlborough and 2414 in Nelson central during the same five-year period.
According to 2018 census data, the most recent available, the populations of the two areas were comparable, with Marlborough home to 47,350 people and Nelson central home to 50,880.
Police officers wanted to help, Thompson said, but they were unable to provide a medical response and were
not necessarily the most appropriate service provider for these jobs.
“There’s a gap in terms of the level of presentation. So we’ve been called,
or families will come to us, because a member of the family is presenting with what they think is a mental health issue, but is probably not at the level or diagnosed by the professionals as being a mental health issue.”
Tasman police had partnered with Te Whatu Ora Nelson Marlborough to see how a co-response team model, involving paramedics, police officers and mental health officers, could work.
There were also co-response team trials elsewhere around the country, in the Counties Manukau, Waitematā (Eastern), Taranaki, Wellington, Hamilton City and Dunedin metro areas. All were deemed successful.
Thompson said a joint approach to mental health made “complete sense” and she hoped it could reduce the number of people who were falling through cracks in the system.
Te Whatu Ora Nelson Marlborough acknowledged that for some people, receiving specialist mental health care when they needed it was a challenge.
Jane Kinsey, the public health agency’s general manager of mental health, addictions and disability support, said that on average, mental health teams at Wairau Hospital in Blenheim saw 141 patients in person or via video per week.
This was calculated over the 12-month period ending on September 30, last year, and included teams offering acute, addictions, adult community, infant, child and adolescent, and older persons’ mental health services. Kinsley said the agency was “working hard” to improve its approach to mental wellbeing.
The previous Labour Government’s 2022 Budget included an investment of $100 million in specialist mental health and addiction services around the country, and Nelson Marlborough had used some of that funding to focus on recruitment.