Policing Strategy

In 2011, the Christie Commission highlighted a series of important principles for public services to make them sustainable and more effective.

One of these principles concerns the need to prioritise expenditure on public services which prevent negative outcomes from arising in the first place.

Police Scotland has been promoting a partnerships and prevention approach since its inception in 2013, but took the step to create a specialist national division - Partnerships, Prevention and Community Wellbeing (PPCW) - in 2019.

PPCW is developing and promoting public health approaches to tackling a wide range of societal issues where the focus is on primary prevention and more seamless operational and strategic working between police and other relevant agencies.

PPCW are currently developing a Mental Health Strategy which, with partners, aims to protect those in crisis through ensuring they get the right service while also reducing demand.

In partnership with the Scottish Ambulance Service, PPCW have also created a ‘call direct from scene’ project which is to ensure officers are not called to or remain too long at medical and mental health crises where other services are best placed to attend.

There is also work underway with Public Health Scotland (PHS) and the Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI) to develop an innovative prevention hub in winter 2023.

Additional partnership initiatives being delivered in relation to dealing effectively with mental health related incidents, which includes work on suicide prevention, include:

Distress Brief Interventions (DBI)

DBIs support those in distress and provide an inter-agency framework to allow appropriate referral of individuals. After initial contact with a front-line responder, such as a police officer, an individual is asked if they would like further support. If the person agrees, they are then referred on to the DBI service who will contact them within 24 hours. This process allows Police Scotland to work more closely with partners to ultimately provide appropriate support to those that need it most.

Mental Health Pathways

Introduced in Police Scotland’s Contact, Command and Control (C3) Division, Mental Health Pathway is a joint process run by Police Scotland and NHS 24. This process allows call handlers to refer callers who are in mental health crisis or distress directly to the NHS24 Mental Health Hub, based on a structured assessment. Once referred to the Hub, the individual will speak to a trained Mental Health Nurse who will be able to provide, or direct to, appropriate support.

Mental Health Dashboards

PPCW and the Demand and Productivity Unit (DPU) are working to better understand and describe the demand generated by mental health incidents on frontline resource, in relation to calls and attendance at incidents. Together they have developed a dashboard which uses a key word search approach to identify all mental health related calls and incidents. This provides an indication of the volume of incidents where mental health has been indicated as relevant.