The State of Care in Mental Health Services in England 2014-2017

By John Tingle

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) is the independent regulator of health and adult social care in England. They have recently published a report of inspections on specialist mental health services. The  report is very thorough and detailed and reveals both good and bad practices. When reading the report however the poor practices identified eclipse the good ones.

Patient safety concerns

Concerns about patient safety are a constant and overarching theme in the report. The CQC biggest concern in this care area is patient safety:

“For both NHS and independent mental health services overall, and for eight of the 11 core services, safe was the key question that we most often rated as requires improvement or inadequate. At 31 May 2017, 36% of NHS core services and 34% of independent core services were rated as requires improvement for safe; a further 4% of NHS core services and 5% of independent core services were rated as inadequate for safe “(29).

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Short-Term Emergency Commitment Laws Require Police to Assess Symptoms of Mental Illness

By Leslie Allen, JD

On November 20, 2014, the Public Health Law Research program released a new 50-state dataset analyzing state law governing the short-term emergency commitment process. These laws give law enforcement officers and others the right to involuntarily admit someone into a mental health care facility if they are in danger of harming themselves or others because of a mental illness.

In 47 states, police may take a person into custody without a warrant, and may initiate an emergency psychiatric hold – essentially committing them to a mental health institution without their consent. Recently, the media has increasingly examined how the police interact with the mentally ill (for example, “Police Taught to Spot Signs of Psychiatric Crisis” from FoxNews, republishing from the  Associated Press, “Police Confront Rising Number of Mentally Ill Suspects” from The New YorkTimes, and see “Where the Police are Part of Mental-Health Care” from The Atlantic). Much of the police forces’ relationship with the mentally ill is established by the laws governing civil commitment.

Police officers serve as first responders for mental health crisis treatment by legislation in nearly every state. Read More