"Gatekeeping to crisis services for vulnerable family member"

The crisis line basically gatekeeps the crisis team - are they working on performance targets and so a referral to the crisis team is seen as a failed target? Or is it because the managers balance the team budget through refusing referrals.

They spend so much time signposting to other agencies when it is their job to support and what they are funded to do. They routinely instead of actually providing the 24 crisis service needed, ring the police to check the person is OK. So unsafe is this so traumatising that all it does is make it more likely harm will come to the ill person because as the Trust know the police are not health professionals and police have no legal rights to remove someone from their home.

I feel this is one of the most abusive practices in mental health.

In case of my family member they have slammed down the phone when they were floridly psychotic telling them to call back when they could be clearer. Because crisis line workers don't apparently know that paranoid delusions and disembodied strangers at the end of a telephone don't mix well.

With us as family they dismiss everything we say and believe us when we say ringing this Trust is an act of last resort. Having to provide almost 24 hrs round the clock care and in between that the police making welfare checks several times a week or now a day. Our family member has ended up hospitalised with very severe injuries after the crisis line/ team failed to listen and assess and support. 

So they know what happens and the risks. 

We are pretty sure that this will happen again if not supported and this time actions will prove fatal.

The crisis team claim they don't operate a blacklist of people they will automatically refuse to see except it is clear they do.

Dangerous silo mentality where they will either signpost back to the GP - who of course has referred the case to them in the first place - begging the question why refer back when YOU as the Trusts have the job is to provide crisis care.

if the GP could do this we wouldn't be here.

Aside from this they refer those considered too ill  to be supported in the community to the section team. Who have a 3 week wait list before they can even go assess and then of course there are NO beds. So bad is this that often the patient is kept in A&E or a temp mental health room elsewhere or in an ambulance  in a police cell when they are NOT arrested for days on end .

And then the Trust transfers them to a chair in a converted office or broom cupboard with no facilities and no privacy or dignity.

The crisis team should be preventing this reaching this point and that is what we , police, paramedics and the GP have been asking them to do.

For weeks.

There is lots online about this Trust. It is not a funding issue . It feels like the toxic culture in NHS mental health where our family member and we as carers are treated as if life wasn;t worth saving.