We’ve started the new year with some familiar messages – more preventing future death reports (PFDs) from UK coroners after someone tragically lost their life in circumstances which gave rise to fears that aspects could be repeated and lead to future tragedy. PFDs are statutory notices, something the Coroner issues to an agency who may control aspects of what went wrong or contributed to the outcome. This could be anything from training of staff, to policies and procedures within or across agencies to anything else thought relevant. The organisation in receipt of such a notice has 56days to respond outlining their reaction to the recommendation(s) and these things are usually uploaded to the Office of the Chief Coroner’s website, where the notices are categorised by theme.

I’ve regularly browsed this website for a number of years and this post comes after another recent session – you may find these links useful, if you wish to do the same. These things are tagged in the way that a social media blog would be, so you may...

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I’ve written about the issue of the Mental Health Act and hotel rooms before – focussing on the stated case of ‘Rosso’. I’m not hyperlinking to the old blog post precisely because it is now redundant and out of date – it was written a few years ago, well before the 2017 changes to the Mental Health Act which took effect in December 2018. Forget it – Rosso is now history and has been for a while.  I want to go through how the police now need to think about hotel rooms and the Mental Health Act 1983, specifically sections 135/136 MHA. This post follows the desperately sad inquest in to the death of Dr Deborah Lamont who, the Coroner ruled today, died by suicide in a Cardiff hotel in March 2019.

It will be necessary and relevant to see the full PFD report from the Coroner to answer some of the questions I’m interested in, but a big issue emerges from this inquest in the immediate media coverage and which addresses a question I was asked only yesterday, during the delivery of training in my own force:

Is a hotel...

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This post arises from a specific event, but it’s far from unique.  I want to use it as an example of something so straight-forward and obvious, yet complex and intractable and which raises a number of questions I suspect are often overlooked or set aside.  It relates to the conveyance of patients who have absconded from hospital and then turned up out of area – ie, out of the area of the police force to which they’ve been reported missing.  It’s about the return of AWOL patients (those who are absent without leave under the Mental Health Act 1983) but it allows me to cover a few things I’ve mentioned before, in a new context of a real incident.  So apologies to those who’ve read of some of these things before, but I’m re-painting the Forth Bridge here, as requested!

Last week at work, another police force had re-detained a patient in their area who was missing from a hospital in our area.  When the patient was reported missing to us by the hospital, we had undertaken certain initial enquiries and asked the other...

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Mental health stuff in policing is not my job any more – not really.  I’m still asked to offer advice or opinion from time to time and most of the other inspectors on my team have used the phone-a-friend service which is inherently on offer when I’m on duty!  I’ve reviewed some incidents and policies when requested, written the odd guidance document over the last nine months but I stopped working full-time on mental health at the end of March last year.  Since April, I’ve been an operational police officer, working 24/7 across the West Midlands and in a few days, I’ll move to another 24/7 role in our force control room, working as a Tactical Firearms Commander (determining whether armed police are deployed to high-threat incidents involving firearms or other potentially lethal weapons and dangers offenders).  It was against the background of my professional role changing I decided some time away from mental health and social media was required whilst I focussed on my new role and took stock of myself as I...

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