Care responders :: Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust

Care responders - improving crisis care for young people.

The National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) has awarded £1.5 million to the care responders project, to evaluate a mental health joint response service to improve emergency care for young people experiencing a mental health crisis.

The study and problem being addressed

A 2022 survey identified that young people need better access to emergency mental health care. Over half of parents surveyed by the Royal College of Emergency medicine said child and young people’s mental health services for emergency care in the UK were ‘poor’ or ‘awful’.

When families call an ambulance or a crisis team, they can face long waiting times. Often the police arrive quickly, but don’t have specialist mental health skills.

We know that when the services work together, young people and families have a better experience.

The care responders study aims to test this and involves a children’s mental health practitioner and police officer attending mental health crisis calls together.

We think this could give the young person and their families a more supportive experience, reducing the risk of harm.

Overall, we aim to improve access to emergency mental health care for young people.

A potential solution

In 2022, Pennine Care, Greater Manchester Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust and Greater Manchester Police worked together to jointly respond to emergency calls for adults in mental health crisis. This meant that a police officer and mental health practitioner went out together to help adults in crisis. The results showed better outcomes for the police and members of the public.

“Saved hours of police time, kept three patrols free for further jobs” - police officer.
“She listened, helped me unravel my thoughts, did an absolutely belting job” - 999 caller.

Research shows young people are better supported when services work together. Our new approach could mean helping young people to feel heard, stay at home, avoid frightening hospital stays and traumatic admissions, and reduce the need for restrictive practices.

Chief investigator for the study, Dr Sarah Parry, from Pennine Care explains: “We have already seen how a joint response for adults in crisis in Greater Manchester has improved outcomes; we’re now keen to hear what young people and families think about this new approach for young people”.

What we will do

We will explore how this intervention could operate effectively within children’s services, working closely with national policy advisors and decision makers to make long-term improvements.

The project will test how well the approach works for young people in crisis across Greater Manchester’s ten boroughs. It will:

Hear what families and young people think
Explore how it could operate effectively within children’s services
Provide robust information to inform future planning of crisis care for young people

How we will do it

First, we will conduct a comprehensive review of all the evidence that exists on the topic so far. We will discuss our findings with people who have lived experience of mental health crisis to develop a theory of how a joint response could help young people.

We will then pilot the joint response to emergency calls from young people in Greater Manchester, to test how well the approach works and hear what young people and their families think about the service.

This information will help us develop the best possible joint response to crisis calls and a guide for how to do it well.

Part of the project will include young people through creative workshops, and this will be delivered in partnership with Made by Mortals.

Made By Mortals are an organisation that use arts, like films and musical theatre, to help refine our theory about how best to run the intervention and how to share our findings.

Associate professor at the University of Oxford, Dr Geoff Wong adds: “This is a complex intervention and its impacts on children will depend on many things - all of which we need to understand.”

Summary of the steps we will take:

We will conduct a review of all the evidence that exists on the topic and discuss our findings with young people, who have lived experience of mental health crisis.
We will use these discussions to develop a theory of how a joint response could work.
We will test the joint response to calls in Greater Manchester, to see how well it works and what young people think about it.

Summary

Overall, we aim to provide key evidence about whether a joined-up service is a better way to support young people in crisis, and evidence as to how it can work as well as possible.

This approach could help young people and their families feel heard and avoid hospital admissions and stays.

This will provide a new framework for future planning for crisis care for young people.

Launch event

We officially launched the care responders project on Friday 6 September at Greater Manchester Police (GMP) Headquarters.

The event featured warm welcomes and insightful introductions from Dr Sarah Parry, chief investigator, Richard Timson, GMP child centre policing lead, DCI Jane Curran of GMP, and Dr. Simon Sandhu, medical director of Pennine Care.

A highlight of the event was an immersive theatre production in collaboration with Made by Mortals, which included a recorded audio story co-created with young people who have lived experience.

Listen to young people’s insights

These audio insights gathered from the event discuss the involvement of young people in research: