MEET the team making a real difference to the area's mental health.

Operation Emblem was set up in December last year initially as a pilot to help reduce the amount of people being arrested under the Mental Health Act or taken to A&E unnecessarily.

The street triage scheme sees 5 Boroughs mental health nurses accompany Cheshire Police out on patrol to offer advice and intervene at the earliest possible stage when someone is identified as having a mental illness.

So far the team of four have ensured the scheme has been extremely successful with a 90 per cent drop in the number of incidents resulting in an offender being sectioned.

The difference is simple.

Trained professionals can chat to and assess patients at the scene and a growing database means more and more cases are now known to the team making it much easier to provide the required help and support.

PC Mark Jenkins said: “It was very frustrating before, a waste of police time and not the best thing for the individual.

“We have got someone now that can make an assessment in 15 minutes rather than hours of police time.

“The demand over the last 10 years has gone off the scale with people committing 60 to 100 offences going around in circles in the justice system but the modern way of looking at things now is trying to find why a person does it and often the denominator is mental health.

“I've had my eyes opened to things now and it's changed my view.

“You don't realise years down the line the effects things like neglect and abuse can have on victims and their mental health.”

Word is spreading with the team now often phoned directly to attend incidents or give advice.

But they have said no two days are the same during shifts, which run between 8am to 2am, as they are called to all kinds of crisis situations stemming from complex mental health problems including self-harm incidents or potentially saving lives after stopping a man in a car who had warned work colleagues he wanted to take his own life.

In nine months, the teams were called to 498 incidents over 186 shifts but only considered sectioning offenders under the Mental Health Act during 59 incidents and of those only six people were sectioned.

After providing a much more co-ordinated approach, the scheme has been rolled out over a 12-month period thanks to funding from Warrington and Halton’s Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs), the two councils and the Police and Crime Commissioner for Cheshire.