Mental health care

Over two million Londoners experience poor mental health every year, and our mental health team of specially trained clinicians provide expert and compassionate care and advice to the around 14,000 calls related to mental ill-health we receive every month.

A&E is not always the right place for someone experiencing a mental health crisis, and can even be stressful or traumatising. We want to reduce the number of mental health patients we take to A&E as their needs can often be met just as, or even more, effectively in their own homes, in the community or alternative care or services.

To help make this happen, we’ve improved our staff’s mental health training and introduced mental nurses into the clinical hub in our control room. They play a crucial role in assessing and signposting patients to the most appropriate point of care or service in their local community for their needs. They are also an expert clinical resource for our ambulance crews and 999 call-takers and share their high level understanding of some of the symptoms and provide advice on the best ways they can support that patient.

Our new mental health response car

In November 2018 we launched a new way of responding to patients in mental health crisis by joining a paramedic with a mental health nurse so we can treat both their physical and mental health needs, which provides a better and more rounded care approach. We are the first ambulance service in the UK to introduce an initiative of this kind and hope it’ll help us reduce the number of avoidable hospital admissions by almost 50%.

We originally launched the mental health joint response car as a pilot, in south east London but now have six cars responding across the capital from 11am to 11pm. The initiative has made a significant impact on the number of unnecessary trips to emergency departments for patients with a mental health problem.

Find out more about our mental health team here.