Police mental health callouts: Hospital staff say they are already getting hurt as cops pull back
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- Police are preparing to pull back on heavy involvement in mental health-related callouts, saying it will enable officers to focus on core policing
- The Police Association and Police Minister have hailed the move as positive, noting officers are not the right people to be helping those in mental distress
- Health workers say they are being injured as a result of the change, which they believe is already happening in some areas
Emergency department and hospital staff are already being hurt as police prepare to make sweeping changes to how they respond to mental health calls, a nurse says.
The police changes include officers not attending some 111 calls if there is no immediate risk to safety, plans to transfer some of these 111 calls to the non-emergency 105 line, and a direction to officers to spend a maximum of 60 minutes waiting in emergency departments with mental health patients.
The goal will ultimately be to have officers leave hospital within 15 minutes of dropping them off.
Good, get the bloody cops out of mental health responses.
Cops are trained thugs, they are the brutal arm of the State and protect capitalist’s property.
More often than not, they are turned on the very communities they are supposed to be ‘protecting’.
Police should not be the ones sent in to deal with people having a mental health episode, we need specially trained ‘First responder mental health teams’ who have the resources and skill set to de-escalate a situation and get a person the help they need.
The problem is that the entire mental health industry is horrifically underfunded and we have dumped them onto the Police, when the Police don’t have the skill set to deal with them.
We need our Police actually countering crime, not wasting their time on mental health call outs which they are more likely to exacerbate than help.
To do this requires enormous investment and a whole new branch of emergency response and with a Government focused on a $2.9b tax break for the richest landlords alongside $14billion in unfordable tax cuts, there is no way of that happening.
The system is now in collapse and the way National have manufactured a cost crisis in Health by purposely underfunding health means things are doomed to become more oppressive for the poorest and most vulnerable.