The Caludon Centre hosts an HBPoS for people of all ages who have been detained under section 136 of the Mental Health Act and require support and assessment. The HBPoS is operational 24 hours a day, seven days a week and has no age restrictions. It is part of the Clinical Coordination Centre: a centralised bed management and staffing centre for the entire Coventry and Warwickshire Partnership NHS Trust.
The Caludon Centre hosts an HBPoS for people of all ages who have been detained under section 136 of the Mental Health Act and require support and assessment. The HBPoS is operational 24 hours a day, seven days a week and has no age restrictions. It is part of the Clinical Coordination Centre: a centralised bed management and staffing centre for the entire Coventry and Warwickshire Partnership NHS Trust. The HBPoS covers Coventry and Warwickshire, with a population of 875,000 people. Staff are provided with internal training to support people with mental health problems safely and on suicide prevention, risk assessment, identification and management. Safeguarding awareness training is also provided and staff attend ‘working with risk’ training days as well as Mental Health Act training.
While the HBPoS supports people of all ages, the trust does not have a specialist children and young people’s mental health inpatient unit. In order to provide age-appropriate support to children and young people, the staff liaise closely with colleagues from the local area children’s wards. The service has joined with colleagues from children and young people’s mental health services to work on identifying solutions for children and young people detained under section 136 and to decide on an appropriate service model. The CQC rated both the HBPoS and the specialist community mental health service for children and young people as ‘good’. Staff aim to keep all section 136 detentions to a maximum of six hours, where possible. In cases where detentions exceed six hours, a multidisciplinary team meets to discuss why this has occurred. The average length of time for assessments in the HBPoS is five hours and 22 minutes (based on figures from June 2016). The service has a clear policy regarding transporting people to the HBPoS and those who are detained under section 136 are expected to be transported by ambulance. Use of police transport is very infrequent and local police constables will provide transport only in exceptional circumstances. In order to continually improve the service, the Department of Psychology at the University of Warwick is conducting research into the experiences and outcomes for those who have been detained under section 136 and taken to the HBPoS for support.
