The Right Care, Right Person (RCRP) initiative began in Humberside, and was subsequently supported by the UK Home Office as meriting introduction across England and Wales. In the first video in a PolicingTV series on RCRP, Humberside Chief Constable, Paul Anderson, tells PolicingTV’s Bernard Rix how the initiative came about, plus key lessons learned by force and partner agencies in Humberside during the initiative’s successful implementation.

“Where did Right Care Right Person [RCRP] start from? It didn’t start from any one individual. I think it would be fair to say it started from our own officers, and it came from feedback from officers, it came from feedback from staff. And what the message was to us was – and it came through crystal clear – was that, over a period of time, over a period of five to ten years, they’d seen an exponential growth… in demand from people suffering from mental health episodes and associated cases”.

“They didn’t feel they were trained or equipped to be able to deal with many of the cases, or many of the episodes”.

“And while they were dealing with that aspect of demand, some real elements of core police work, our pure ‘raison d’etre’, preventing and detecting crime, that was also starting to suffer”.

“Right Care Right Person is about people that are going through a difficult time in their life, people that are not necessarily criminals, they’re not bad, they’re people that are ill, being seen by the right person, the right professional, who can help care for them”.

“It was the ultimate ‘wicked problem: everyone knew it was a problem, everyone agreed, but there was no obvious answer or solution. At that point, when you got everyone around a table, that’s when the real conversation began”.