Police response uncertainty in mental health emergencies
East London NHS Foundation Trust received 2 coroners' reports about this hazard between 27 Jun 2018 and 12 Jun 2023.
They came from 2 different coroners in 2 coroner areas. A similar concern was raised again 1 time after the first warning.
A published response was found for 1 of the 1 earlier reports, stating 1 specific action.
The story, report by report
Spacing grows with the time between reports.
“The social work team leader dealing with the case was of the view that the police were the best placed to initiate emergency procedures under the Mental Health Act.”
Original on judiciary.uk ↗ East London NHS Foundation Trust responded.Response (PDF) ↗
- 4 years 11 months laterClosely relatedConfidence 0.85 · higha different coroner
“I was left with the impression that a clinician calling the police in what the clinician perceived to be an emergency situation might not be assisted by the police.”
Original on judiciary.uk ↗ Repeated from the earlier report:policeemergency
East London NHS Foundation Trust responded, stating 1 specific action.Response (PDF) ↗
“The Trust intends to incorporate scenarios involving patients going AWOL on escorted leave into its induction training for new staff in the relevant services. In addition there will be a 2-yearly refresher for Section 17 and Escort training. The scenario training will incorporate such situations and include reference to the information that needs to be considered by the escorting staff and fed back to staff on the wards to help in making a decision around risk and level of escalation needed. The”
Stated timescale: next 3-6 months
- All reports to East London NHS Foundation Trust
Each row is one judged link between an earlier and a later report. Open a row to read both quotes, found word for word in the originals.
2018 → 2023Heather Findlay4 years 11 months after Dudley Brown · different coronerClosely relatedConfidence 0.85 · high
Closely relatedConfidence 0.85 · highBoth reports highlight uncertainty about whether police will assist when contacted during a mental‑health crisis. They differ in focus: the earlier note concerns a belief that police are best placed to act, while the later note questions whether police will actually respond.
Dudley Brown · 27 Jun 2018
“The social work team leader dealing with the case was of the view that the police were the best placed to initiate emergency procedures under the Mental Health Act.”
Original on judiciary.uk ↗ Heather Findlay · 12 Jun 2023
“I was left with the impression that a clinician calling the police in what the clinician perceived to be an emergency situation might not be assisted by the police.”
Original on judiciary.uk ↗
No specific action could be extracted with a verified quote.
Stated action · timescale: next 3-6 months
“The Trust intends to incorporate scenarios involving patients going AWOL on escorted leave into its induction training for new staff in the relevant services. In addition there will be a 2-yearly refresher for Section 17 and Escort training. The scenario training will incorporate such situations and include reference to the information that needs to be considered by the escorting staff and fed back to staff on the wards to help in making a decision around risk and level of escalation needed. The”
- Each report's concerns were extracted by Nemotron 3 Nano on Nebius Token Factory, each with a quote copied from the report.
- Concerns from reports to East London NHS Foundation Trust at least six months apart were compared by meaning (Qwen3 embeddings) and wording (TF-IDF).
- The closest pairs were judged by Nemotron 3 Super with reasoning on. Only identical or closely related, with confidence of at least 0.70, are shown.
- Every quote was checked by code as an exact substring of the original text. Names of staff and family are redacted, and the deceased are named by report title only.
| Link | Meaning | Wording | Judge | Coroner |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 → 2023 | 0.71 | 0.12 | Closely related · 0.85 | different |
Judge model: nvidia/nemotron-3-super-120b-a12b. How Nemotron did the work · Full methodology.
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Other chains for East London NHS Foundation Trust
This shows that a similar concern was raised again after an earlier report. It does not say why, and it is not a finding about any organisation or person. To report an error, see the corrections route.