Presentation: Designing a police service for callers in mental health crisis

A significant amount of demand on police across the UK comes from people experiencing a mental health crisis, who pose a danger to themselves, or to others. However, in many instances, the police can be poorly equipped to help, and people will often be better supported by mental health professionals.

The Mental Health Pathway is a collaboration between Police Scotland and NHS 24, transferring people who call 101 or 999, in mental health need, to the appropriate service with the support of in-house Mental Health Nurse Practitioners.

Despite the new service looking good on paper, referrals to the mental health hub were lower than expected and there was no measurable reduction in the number of mental health calls attended by officers. Rather than write off the experiment, the project team approached Police Scotland’s service design team to help redesign the pathway.

In this talk, Lou Kerr, the lead service designer on the project, will explain more about the problem the service tackled, the service design approach, and what happened next.

What's the community doing?

We’re really keen to hear what design projects you’re currently working on and will focus on this in the second half of the event.

To secure your place, please register here
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Registration closes on Monday 25 November 16:00