Emerging Themes & Next Steps

Full detail of the content of the day and key themes identified through discussion can be found in the event summary report. Delegates felt it was important to consider data availability and sharing, handover between agencies, strengthening prevention activity, empowering officers to take risk and evidence-based decisions, ensuring a person centred and trauma informed approach and recognising the associated trauma experienced by the workforce.

A series of commitments were made by Police Scotland in response to the event. These focused on development of an approach to responding to mental health demand consistently, further development of mental health data and dashboards, delivery of a new way of working with Scottish Ambulance Service, development of the partnership prevention hub, and delivery of recommendations from the forthcoming HMICS inspection on policing mental health in Scotland.

HMICS have now undertaken their thematic review of policing mental health in Scotland, which is expected to be published by the end of September 2023. Police Scotland, the Authority, and any other relevant stakeholders, will develop an improvement plan in response to recommendations from the review. This will align to the ongoing focus on mental health as reported through policing performance and people committees, with outputs from the trauma and policing event reported through People Committee in August.

Work is progressing on the development of a community wellbeing strategy for Police Scotland, which incorporates mental health in the wider focus on wellbeing and vulnerability. This widening of the focus beyond just mental health will ensure the interdependencies across a range of vulnerabilities are identified and responded to in a way which is trauma informed and person centred.

Operational activity has also continued to make good progress, with the demand dashboard, previously reported to committee in October 2022, currently being piloted across A, N and G divisions with further developments in train. This work will ensure that Police Scotland have a comprehensive picture of non-crime mental health demand on policing to inform discussions with key partners.

Linked to this is the development of information sharing protocols with Scottish Ambulance Service which allow for police officers, when operationally safe to do so, to make direct contact with them via a dedicated contact number, rather than passing requests through the Area Control Room. This allows SAS call handlers to use the full triage question set, direct with officers on scene, to identify the appropriate medical response. It is currently assessed that this process reduces average officer deployment time by 45 minutes. Work is underway to evaluate the impact of the current approach.

Finally work is progressing well on the creation of a prevention hub in partnership with Edinburgh Futures Institute. This will support the commitment made by Police Scotland and Public Health Scotland in 2021 to work together to embed a whole systems public health approach to policing and improve the health and wellbeing of communities. The Scottish Prevention Hub, due to open in Winter 2023, will build data and evidence while strengthening capacity and capability for collaborative work in this area.