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, explained more about the problem the service tackled, the service design approach, and what happened next.

View Lou's slides

View the video recording of Lou's presentation

What's the community doing?

We had a great discussion where community members shared updates on innovative and impactful service design projects at various stages, from discovery to delivery. These projects highlighted the transformative power of service design in driving digital innovation, enabling service transformation and fostering leadership and inclusivity.

Transformational Service Change and Digital Innovation

Many projects focused on reimagining services through digital transformation:

• NHS 24’s Redesign of Care Pathways: Exploring ways to improve urgent and unscheduled care, preventative care, and mental health services.
• Police Scotland’s Virtual Police Station: An ambitious step in their digital transformation journey.
• User Research into Psychology Apps: NES is conducting research into various psychology apps designed to support the mental health and well-being of young people, adults, and families.

Engaging Users Early in the Design Process

A common theme was involving users and people with lived and living experiences to ensure services meet their needs:

• NHS 24’s Self-Referral Pathways: Incorporating lived and living experiences input to design digital self-referral systems for Sexual Assault Referral Centres.
• Perinatal Services in Tayside: Conducting co-design sessions to identify challenges, generate ideas, and develop actionable projects for perinatal care pathways under the Best Start initiative.

Shaping Leadership and Mindsets through Service Design

Service design is also driving cultural change and innovation at leadership levels:

• Perinatal Services Development: Creative approaches are being used to inspire new ways of thinking and encourage innovation in perinatal care services in Tayside.

Embedding Service Design and Building Capabilities

Institutionalising service design within the public sector is a key theme:

• Service Design E-Learning Modules: Initiatives by the Scottish Government’s Digital Office to train local government staff and measure service design maturity.
• Service Design Capabilities : Bottom-up efforts aimed at empowering staff across local government, health and social care partnerships to develop their own change ideas using service design skills.

Academic Projects

• Data Science and Service Design: Using data science to improve health and social care services.
• Inclusivity in Social Spaces: Research exploring how public spaces, such as pubs, can become more inclusive for everyone.