No Care In The Community

I was on earlies today and spent a couple of hours writing a letter of complaint to a mental health trust elsewhere in the country.

Yesterday, a group of their staff had brought some of their residents to our patch on a day trip. At about half eleven in the morning one of them (a schizophrenic male in his 30's) did a runner. The staff called us at half three to report him missing. During the call, they classified him as "vulnerable".

The staff remained until just after 5pm but then left to return to their residential unit. By coincidence, within a couple of minutes of them phoning us to say they were off, we received a call from a local school reporting a strange male wandering round the school grounds talking to the children there.

Officers popped up and it was the same male.

We called back the staff, who by this time were still only about twelve miles away, and gave them the happy news. Their response? Put him in a taxi.

We pointed out that, as he was vulnerable (their words) that we had a duty of care to him and couldn't just chuck him in a taxi and wash our hands of him. We asked them to meet officers at a Little Chef nearby. At this point, because the Little Chef was quite a way off our patch, they were only about a ten minute drive from the restaurant.

Bearing in mind we weren't even asking them to come all the way back, we didn't feel that this was too unreasonable. But apparantly it was. The staff on their minibus at first refused to turn round, then turned their mobiles off. We spoke to their managers who also refused to make the staff come and collect the male and suggested we either detain him (under the Mental Health Act) or just leave him to get a train or taxi home.

To cut a long story short, two Police officers ended up driving the best part of 200 miles in order to get this guy back to his residential centre. All because the staff who had brought him out for the day wouldn't accept any responsibility for him.

This got me speaking with another Sergeant and an Inspector. The Police Service is the only public body who don't have the luxury of being able to say, "nope, not our job". All others, mental hospitals, social services etc, regularly turn their backs on people who need their help and refuse to accept the moral, if not legal, obligations their jobs bring.

I'm not talking about all people in these jobs, obviously. One of the Senior Nurses on duty at the residential centre when officers got there was amazingly helpful. But if you go into something like Social Work, you would hope that you'd expect to have to put yourself out every now and again to help somebody in need. And it must be a complete pain sometimes with under funding and heavy workloads. But it's part of the job.

Because the residential staff had apparantly sought advice from a psychiatrist who stated we could just put the male in a taxi, we'd have been covered by doing so. If something had gone wrong and somebody had been hurt, our arses would have been covered. But the Police officers dealing thought that the chap needed more than that.

And this sort of thinking brings consequences. If you lived on our patch last night and called for help, it might have taken longer than normal for us to reach you. Part of the reason is that half the squad on duty were miles away doing somebody elses job for them.