Staffordshire’s Police and Crime Commissioner has strongly criticised the county’s NHS mental health services for a series of failures that led to a seriously ill man being kept in police custody for nearly 64 hours over a long weekend.
Matthew Ellis today (Mon) described the incident as “tragic and avoidable” and accused the NHS in North Staffordshire of abandoning a seriously mentally ill person to be looked after by the police.
The PCC has now demanded an urgent investigation into the incident in March, which took up 71 hours of police officer time and involved 22 officers as events escalated over a three-day period.
He has asked the independent Ethics, Transparency and Audit Panel (ETAP), established by Mr Ellis to scrutinise policing, to carry out a review of why a man who had not committed a crime was kept in police custody because suitable care wasn’t available elsewhere.
The PCC has issued a shocking three-day timeline of the incident, which highlights a series of phone calls, texts and conversations with mental health professionals that failed to help find a suitable place of safety for the 47-year-old man, who had left a hospital in London and ended up in Stoke-on-Trent. On one occasion the man was taken into hospital but then returned to the police because a bed hadn’t been found and there wasn’t a suitable environment for him to be cared in.
Mr Ellis has led a cross-agency approach in Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent to stop people in mental health crisis ending up in police cells simply for being ill. This led to significant improvements and saw the number of these cases fall by almost two-thirds – from 168 in 2012 to 69 in 2014.
Mr Ellis said: “The scale and gravity of failings across the mental healthcare system in this specific case is by no means a daily occurrence. But it does, I’m sad to say, again highlight an abandonment by mental health services of a troubled individual, leaving police to be the first, last and only resort available.
“It is clear from the evidence presented to me so far that this was primarily a failure by anyone responsible for mental health services to ‘grip’ a complex situation involving an individual who needed healthcare, not incarceration in a police cell.
“This wasn’t, on the face of it, even about money. No, this was about a failure of mental health services management to take responsibility and be accountable for their services across Staffordshire, regionally and wider.
“Over the last two years, and working closely with Staffordshire Police, I’ve invested additional resources in NHS mental health services. Alongside better training for police officers it’s meant there’s been a significant reduction in the number of people who are simply ill finding themselves in a cell.
“The events over this long weekend are a stark reminder that no matter how much money is provided, it takes organisations and the management of those organisations to be responsible and accountable; something that simply didn’t happen here over a three- day period. I cannot imagine the impact this experience had on an individual who already had enormous challenges to cope with and I understand his health deteriorated very significantly during the period. That is tragic and was avoidable.
“It is important that we understand exactly where things should have been done differently which is why I have asked ETAP to undertake an independent review into the circumstances across agencies in the hope that lessons can be learned and accountability and responsibility in the future is clearer.
“I hope that the mental health providers involved will cooperate with this important examination of the facts and circumstances.”
The Ethics, Transparency and Audit Panel (ETAP) was launched under the ‘New Dawn of Transparency’ agenda by Mr Ellis and aims for policing in Staffordshire to be the most open and transparent in the country. Ten members of the public sit on the ETAP and meet regularly to monitor the work of police including how crime is recorded, how complaints from the public are dealt with, the use of Taser and ‘stop and search’ powers.
Find out more about ETAP here
