Report Summary
This report provides members of the Policing Performance Committee with an overview of Mental Health Governance & Demand.
The purpose of this briefing paper is to provide a progress update in respect of the work PPCW Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Department in conjunction with Demand and Productivity Unit have carried out to create a Mental Health Dashboard.
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Meeting
The publication discussed was referenced in the meeting below
Policing Performance Committee - 11 October 2022
Date : 11 October 2022
Location : online
Data Extraction
DPU data dashboards are populated with statistical information from various policing systems recorded by staff/officers every day; systems such as Missing Persons, Crime, iVPD and STORM. While the majority of these can be defined as having a very high level of accuracy, limitations do exist when it comes to the granular reporting of complex definitions such as Mental Health. These limitations require alternative methodologies to be developed in order to bridge the reporting gap and provide additional detail. The lack of reliability in the effective use of closure codes and incident tags for these types of incidents, meant that these could not be used alone for this purpose and DPU staff have had to take an alternative approach to facilitate the creation of this dashboard.
The DPU used academically proven key words, linked to mental health related incidents, to extract the relevant incidents containing key information in the free text section. Although this is the most advanced method currently available, it does impact on reliability. For example, ‘hanging’ is one of the key words identified and although it is predominantly used in the context of mental health, there is an example of an incident where a bumper is ‘hanging’ off.
Collectively PPCW/DPU have tested over 4000 STORM incidents (recorded from 2016-2021), to validate the selection of those academically proven key words. The outcome of testing was positive as the keyword selection resulted in a 90% link to mental health indication, there is scope for this to improve as the dashboard develops.
Due to the nature of the methodology applied to this dashboard, rather than defining the data as being ‘mental health incidents’, a more accurate description would be an incident where mental health has been indicated (through the key word). It also does not imply the strength or the extent of a mental health association. For example, one of the incidents related to a member of the public telephoning the police as youths kicking a ball off of her fence was impacting on her ‘mental health’. It is unknown if the reporter would have required to contact the police should she not be suffering from a mental health issue.
The dashboard has recently been updated to live time, which refreshes daily, to give an accurate account of present-day demand and other specific timeframe required by the user.
