One of the core motivations of SONAR is to enable more agencies across healthcare, social care, and criminal justice to work together effectively. SONAR will achieve this by enabling real-time sharing of accurate health information between different settings so that the Right Information will enable the Right Person to deliver Better Care
Our goal is to provide up-to-date health information from a wide range of sources in an accessible format for healthcare professionals to determine appropriate courses of action. Success will be measured by reductions in preventable deaths and serious harm significantly, and improvements in treatment quality, rates and outcomes for detained populations. Capturing and presenting patient data in suitable formats to enable better treatment and more informed decision-making to reduce recidivism, with fewer crimes and victims of crime.
Right Care Right Person
This is relevant to a key current initiative, Right Care Right Person (RCRP), first developed by Humberside Police in 2019. The Chief Constable and the Humberside PCC described the programme at a hearing of the Health and Social Care Select Committee in September 2023.
The Chief Constable said that the impetus for a new approach came from his officers. They were conscious that they were attending a greater number of people suffering from poor mental health – but felt that they did not have the skills or experience to help them effectively:
“Day in, day out our officers and staff were saying to us that they were dealing with an increased demand from mental health, but they felt they did not have the skills or ability to help the people. The question is, who is better to deal with a patient going through crisis? In many of these circumstances, and in many of the daily incidents we were attending, someone with training—a mental health doctor or nurse—has to be a better person for someone going through trauma than a police officer.”
The police inspectorate in England had come to the same conclusion in 2018.
Humberside Police worked with health practitioners over three years to develop a new model. Police officers would attend scenes when a police presence was required – when there was an immediate risk to life, when a crime was being committed or when there was a possibility of degrading or inhumane treatment. Otherwise, local mental health services would respond. Adrian Elsworth, general manager of urgent and emergency mental health at Humber Teaching NHS Foundation Trust, told the Committee that genuine partnership between police and health services has meant that the needs of every person have been met:
“Mental health services are involved at every step of that. However, when we get higher up and when there are more concerns around risk to an individual, there is still a role for the police to play. It is very much around understanding whose role it is at what juncture and, more importantly, having routes of escalation to allow those conversations so that nobody falls through the net in regard to care needs.”
National Roll-out
The programme has received support from government. In July 2023, the Home Office and the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners (APCC) and NHS England supported the national implementation of the programme.
The guidance explains that it is appropriate for police to respond to calls “to investigate a crime that has occurred or is occurring; or to protect people, when there is a real and immediate risk to the life of a person, or of a person being subject to or at risk of serious harm”.
The guidance emphasised that partnership is essential, and that local partnerships must be in place before changes in police response take place:
“It is crucial that at the heart of planning and implementing RCRP for people with mental health needs, there is a focus on ensuring patient safety is maintained and people in mental health crisis are not left without support. This means the approach to RCRP implementation for people with mental health needs should be planned and developed jointly through cross-agency partnerships before changes to responses are introduced. While police forces will ultimately determine the timeframe for implementing the RCRP approach locally, it should be established following engagement with health, social care, and other relevant partners. Once implemented, locally developed arrangements should be monitored and reviewed over time.”
National mental health leaders have emphasised the need for evaluation of the impact on health services around the country and have called for extra resources for mental health services. Sean Duggan, chief of the NHS Confederation’s mental health network, has said:
“Health leaders are pleased that the DHSC has commissioned a short-term evaluation project into the impact on the NHS in five areas but now want to see this as an ongoing evaluation across the country. It must also include the views and experiences of people with mental health issues and have a focus on the most at-risk groups. The aims of Right Care Right Person are laudable. But it must be implemented at a pace that doesn’trisk the safety of some of the most vulnerable people in our society.”
SONAR – Supporting Partnership
SONAR is ideally placed to support partnership working of the kind embodied in Right Care Right Person. Through appropriate information governance, security of data, informed patient consent and role-based access controls, SONAR can record the medical and social care needs of the patient.
Through appropriate and authorised data sharing agreements, SONAR can then share the patient record between:
Healthcare Professionals
Mental Health Practitioners
Police officers and other emergency service professionals
Social Care organisations and agencies
Voluntary sector organisations – who have been a key part of delivery in Humberside.
The aim is to reduce the risk to the person, enable a safe intervention by the Police and enhance any vital sharing of medical and social care information by health and social care professionals. The Right Information will enable the Right Person to deliver Better Care, and enable more people to live the best life they can.
John White
Founder & CEO
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