Hertfordshire police chief to address hundreds of hours officers spend in A&E
One of the “key priorities” of Hertfordshire’s top cop is to address the amount of time police officers are spending with patients in A&E departments.
Officers in Hertfordshire are reported to spend in excess of 1,000 hours a month looking after residents who are in ‘crisis’, because they are unable to hand them over to NHS staff.
That, says Hertfordshire’s chief constable Andy Prophet, is time when those officers are not enforcing speed limits, out in the high streets or dealing with community concerns.
And at a meeting of the county council’s public health and community safety cabinet panel on Wednesday he said it was one of his “key priorities to fix”.
In response to a question from Labour Cllr Dr Beth Kelly about the existing situation, he said: “It doesn’t work at the moment. It doesn’t work because the health system in itself is having challenges. I am not blaming any other colleagues or any other partners on this.
“But we have officers sat – to everyone’s frustration, including health staff – with people who are mentally unwell in hospitals or mental health dedicated suites and they can’t get released. It’s one of my key priorities to fix. We will fix it.”
Outlining the scale of the issue, the chief constable said “100s and 100s and 100s of hours a month of officer time” were spent sitting with someone who is “in distress and is unwell”.
And during this time, he said those officers were “not enforcing the 20mph speed limits or they’re not dealing with the community concerns or they’re not visible in the high street or they’re not targeting knife thieves”.
He acknowledged the issues faced by the health services, suggesting they “have got no capability to deal with it, because they have bed blockages”.
And he said: “They can’t get people into a mental health bed to release them from the assessment suites. It needs fixing.”
Nevertheless the chief constable said he had already started to address the issue, and that he would be “really quite noisy about it”.
“It is a conversation that I have already started with my counterparts in the mental health trust and others,” he told councillors. “And I’ll be really quite noisy about it.
“But I’ll be noisy about it with them first. We’re going to try and fix it together, because it’s not right at the moment.”