Occupational Therapy News OTnews October 2019 | Page 12

NEWS
Occupational therapist attending 999 mental health calls to help people bypass A&E
An occupational therapist has been attending mental health calls
to the ambulance service in North West Sussex
A rotating team, that also includes a social worker, nurse and
psychologist from Sussex Partnership Foundation Trust, are
partnered with a paramedic from Sussex East Coast Ambulance
Service, with mental health calls to 999 and 111 services
signposted to them.
Steven Rowley, whose main job is as an acute day service
manager, says: ‘We go out and we try and get people the
treatment they need as soon as possible, helping to keep people
away from accident and emergency (A&E). If someone is mentally
ill and distressed, going to A&E and waiting there for three or four
hours to be assessed is not the best thing for them. The idea is
to bypass that and either refer to a crisis team, group treatment
– such as the acute day service I manage – or refer for Mental
Health Act assessment.’
Around a third of referrals to the service are because a person
is suicidal, and another third are due to self-harm. Other common
referral reasons include overdoses, psychosis and anxiety. A third of
people who are referred are not known to mental health services.
Less than a fifth of people attended by the service then go on
to A&E, with people instead often referred on to other services
that can better support them.
‘The benefit of our service is I can refer people to group
treatment or the crisis team and they are automatically put on their
caseload, and within a day or so they are seeing the crisis team,’
says Steven, adding it saves the person repeating their story
multiple times to different professionals. He adds that it is good to
see people in their home environment, with some overlap in the
patients he sees in his main role.
The service was piloted four years ago with a nurse and
paramedic and has run continuously in some form since then, and
is currently operating daily during peak hours. Steven joined a year
ago when the service ran daily and the rotation system begun.
‘The paramedics tell me that each discipline has a different
perspective on things,’ he says. ‘For people, particularly if they
have EUPD [emotionally unstable personality disorder], it’s good to
Steven Rowley (left), part of the team attending mental health calls
Quote of the month
‘If someone is mentally ill and distressed,
going to A&E and waiting there for three or
four hours to be assessed is not the best thing
for them’
Steven Rowley, occupational therapist
have a distraction of talking about what things they used to do that
they want to get back to – what they will do to get up tomorrow to
keep motivated. From an occupational therapy perspective, it’s a
question of what they used to do, but they aren’t able to do at this
moment in time, and how do we get people back to that.’
The service is run from a marked car, meaning that Steven does
have to sometimes attend category one calls with the paramedic,
where an immediate response is posed to a life-threatening
condition. ‘It’s varied, which makes it quite exciting,’ he says.
Nearby ambulance services are now asking about the service
to see if they can start something similar.
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12 OTnews October 2019