Right Care Right Person

Nationally, estimates show that implementing RCRP could save around one million police officer hours each year. This means frontline officers will be able to spend more time preventing crime, protecting our communities and bringing offenders to justice.

Additionally, when speaking to those who have experienced mental health crisis, including those who have been under 136 mental health detention, service users say they did not want to see a police officer and in fact found it traumatic.

We began the roll out of RCRP early in 2023, making sure we are only going ahead with each phase when we are confident that our staff are trained, it is safe to make the change and our partners are all aware of the change we will be making.  So far, we have gone live with changes in our response to calls reporting a concern for the welfare of an individual and where our partners report patients who have worked out of healthcare facilities.

The changes for concern for welfare calls are to ensure we are the most appropriate agency and if the caller is able to make reasonable enquiries themselves.  Sometimes this will result in us asking our partners to complete their own checks, where they have legal duties of care.

Where our partners report patients having walked out of hospital without being formally discharged we previously would have treated them as a missing person.  In August 2021, an updated framework for multi-agency response for adults missing from health and care settings was published and our new response to these types of calls is in line with this framework.

In England and Wales, police receive more than 300,000 reports of missing people each year.  These incidents vary considerably, and officers will use all available information to determine levels of risk and whether a police response is required.  This assessment ensures those most at risk are identified and prioritised.

Our duty is to protect our communities and we will always attend where there is a threat to life, or someone is in danger.  In some situations, a police officer may not be the most appropriate person to attend as the victim may be better looked after by a different agency or professional with specialist skills and expertise.

The implementation of RCRP will not stop us from continuing to perform our key role of keeping people safe, but to ensure the most appropriate agency with the correct training and experience in managing mental health issues responds to a person in crisis.

We want to reiterate that we are not stepping away from health-related incidents, as we still have a duty to protect our communities and will always attend incidents where there is a real and immediate threat to life or serious harm to an individual or others around them.