Police chiefs want NHS to pay for mental health calls

A POLICE force is to become the first in Britain to bill the NHS for the time its officers spend on “unnecessary” mental health call-outs.

Bedfordshire’s policing chief has calculated its officers spend at least 53,000 hours a year on such cases – equal to the work of 23 full-time constables.

Festus Akinbusoye, the county’s police and crime commissioner, has told his force to break down the costs to present the NHS with a quarterly bill.

“We can’t have police officers spending seven hours in A&E. It’s not just about money. It’s about the resources taken from the frontline,” he said.

Once he has the audit of costs he will send it to the appropriate health trusts, asking: “Do you want us to find a way of resolving this or do you want to pay this bill to the force? It is not sustainable.”

Police chiefs plan to halve the mental health call-outs they attend as they come under pressure to get “back to the basics” of solving crime.

The Metropolitan Police has said only 22 per cent of the calls it receives are crime-related and Chris Noble, the Chief Constable for Staffordshire Police, said his officers could no longer spend “more time in A&E” than on handling crime.

“I’m just not going to do that anymore,” he said. “We’ll give people proper notice, it’s not going to be a cliff edge but something different needs to happen.”

Humberside Police, Britain’s highestrated crime-fighting force, has negotiated a deal with healthcare agencies so that officers are quickly replaced by specialists if they are first on the scene.

“What this has meant is that more than 1,000 officer-hours per month have been re-allocated to enable us to focus on what communities want us to be doing, that being proactive policing,” said Chief Constable Lee Freeman.

Similar schemes are being adopted by forces in London, Lincolnshire, Hampshire and North Yorkshire.