How British Transport Police built a national system for mental health crisis handovers

Officers used to spend close to four hours waiting at hospitals with people in mental health crisis, filling in different paperwork depending on which NHS site they reached. This is how British Transport Police, working with Thalamos, replaced that with a single national digital process, and cut that average wait by almost two-thirds along the way.

British Transport Police (BTP) has now been shortlisted in five categories at the NPCC Innovation and Digital Awards 2026 for its national rollout of a digital Section 136 process. This article traces the problem it was built to solve, how it was built, how it was rolled out, and what the data now shows. For more detail about BTP’s award nominations, see our dedicated article.

Why BTP built its own programme

BTP polices the rail network across England, Wales and Scotland rather than a fixed local area, so its officers routinely move between NHS Mental Health Trust and Integrated Care Board boundaries within a single shift. When Right Care, Right Person was introduced nationally, setting out when police should and shouldn’t respond to mental health incidents, BTP did not adopt it directly.

Inspector Christopher Sutherland, who has led the programme, said that reflected BTP’s unique position where, because officers work across the rail environment, the force generally cannot decline to respond in the way local forces sometimes can under Right Care, Right Person. “Due to the nature of our environment, and often the immediate access to lethal means, at the point of report to policing, it’s harder for us to turn around and say no,” he added. Once an officer responds to a call, BTP takes on what Sutherland describes as a common law duty of care for that person, regardless of how the incident develops.

Instead, BTP built its own programme called Mental Health Crisis to Care which is aligned to the principles behind Right Care, Right Person, but designed around its own operating model.

Before 2025, Section 136 handovers relied on paper forms, completed by hand during live incidents and handed over at a health-based place of safety, sometimes verbally, sometimes by phone, and frequently duplicated across different local versions of the same form. Data on what had happened sat in a crisis database roughly two weeks behind events, covering all vulnerability incidents rather than Section 136 detentions specifically.

Sutherland described the pre-2025 model as an “umbrella approach”, where officers followed local NHS process wherever they were deployed, on top of national standards, so the practical experience of a handover varied by location.

Choosing the system and piloting it

BTP reviewed several existing systems, including police-only tools already in use elsewhere, before selecting MH Forms by Thalamos. Sutherland explained the deciding factor was less a single feature than the ability to function as a shared record between police and NHS staff. The resulting build included live dashboards, mandatory fields, escalation indicators, supervisor oversight tools, transfer functionality for handovers between shifts, a Police Presence Log, structured consultation prompts and data validation, with live analytics broken down by division, place of safety and Integrated Care Board.

Rather than a single national launch, BTP piloted the digital process in Liverpool and Manchester over twelve weeks from May 2025. The purpose of the pilot was to identify operational problems before they became a national issue, and to gather direct feedback from officers using the system in live incidents. National rollout followed on 31 July 2025, across all seven BTP divisions.

National rollout and NHS adoption

Getting the NHS side of the process working required different work from getting officers to use the digital form. BTP does not manage NHS Mental Health Trusts, so adoption there depended on collaboration rather than instruction. Sutherland says early engagement with government agencies provided initial support, followed by work with regional NHS teams, individual Trusts and single points of contact, backed by NHS-facing training and guidance.

Internally, BTP supported the rollout with force-wide e-learning accessed by more than 400 officers, in-person superuser sessions, divisional champions, weekly operational drop-in webinars and monthly divisional meetings where officers raise issues directly, alongside continuous software changes made in response to officer and NHS feedback during the first six months. Training has continued well beyond the initial rollout with mental health incidents and the digital process now built into every new officer’s probation training, so induction runs on an ongoing basis rather than being tied to the original launch date.

On the NHS side, Sutherland says hesitation at individual sites was rarely about the principle of digital handover and more often about local infrastructure and confidence using a new system, which is what the NHS-facing training package was designed to address. BTP and Thalamos are still actively directing some Trusts to that training more than a year into rollout, rather than treating it as a one-off induction.

Sutherland believes one of the clearer lessons from the rollout was that NHS engagement works better run locally than centrally. National-level conversations opened the door, but he found that officers with an existing relationship at a specific Trust made faster progress than the same message delivered from BTP headquarters. “There’s something even more powerful about the person with the local knowledge, the local accent and the local voice,” he added, “as opposed to someone from Edinburgh phoning up someone in Liverpool and telling them their hospitals aren’t up to scratch.”

He has also started inviting Thalamos’s own client management team to sit in on divisional meetings directly, rather than keeping the supplier relationship separate from local NHS engagement, and says having live data to hand removes another barrier to those conversations. “I can just go into a Trust and say, right, that’s it,” he says. “I don’t need to spend hours prepping for it.”

Thalamos CEO Arden Tomison said the uneven picture on the NHS side was expected and shaped how the system was built. “Most of the difficult work isn’t police-facing at all. It’s making sure a place of safety that is still largely on paper and a fully digital Mental Health Trust can both receive the same record and actually use it. BTP’s officers move across the whole country in a way most forces don’t, so we had to design around the least digitally mature site in the network, not the most advanced one.”

What the six-month data shows

BTP’s six-month evaluation, covering the period from national rollout, recorded 95% officer adoption across all seven divisions and 609 Section 136 incidents digitally recorded. Average officer time spent at a health-based place of safety fell by 63%, from 219 minutes to 79, which BTP estimates as approximately £45,000 in efficiency savings over six months, or around £90,500 annualised.

Consultation with a healthcare professional prior to detention increased by 9%, and handovers completed within the four-hour standard set out in the Mental Health Crisis Care Concordat increased by 6%. Three-quarters of incidents had forms digitally shared with an NHS organisation, and 78% of those shared forms were accessed by NHS staff.

Officers rated the system 4.46 out of 5 for ease of completion, and 56% reported improved recording accuracy. NHS partners reported clearer, more legible information than the scanned or handwritten forms it replaced, and officers identified accessibility benefits, including for colleagues with dyslexia, through autocorrect and structured digital completion.

Sutherland explained that the main change is not the reduction in officer time itself, but the operational visibility the data now provides: whether an officer sought clinical guidance before detaining someone, how handover times vary by site, and where NHS engagement is weaker or stronger. He has also begun pairing a digital form with the corresponding control room log to raise formal complaints with hospitals when a handover falls well outside expected timescales, with the aim of keeping a documented pattern that can be escalated further if needed.

Some parts of the wider system remain unresolved. When BTP hands an incident to a territorial force, sometimes the digital record does not necessarily transfer if that force runs a separate system. Tomison agrees that gap is the more difficult problem to solve next. “BTP has shown what one force can do when it commits to this properly. The harder job is making sure a person doesn’t lose that same visibility the moment they cross into a force, or a Trust, that isn’t set up the same way. At that point it stops being a technology problem and becomes a coordination one, between forces, and between us and whichever supplier is on the other side.”

BTP’s shortlisting across five NPCC Innovation and Digital Awards 2026 categories reflects the scale of what has been built in eighteen months, and Sutherland is clear about what he thinks it represents. “It’s been a long slog,” he said. “You’re constantly pushing against different cultures and trying to get people on board, and it’s about change management.” For him, the bigger achievement is less any single statistic than a working model other forces and NHS organisations can now draw on. “It’s not necessarily just about what’s best for your organisation,” he added. “It’s actually about what’s best for the individual.”

For more detail about BTP’s NPCC Innovation and Digital Awards nominations, see our dedicated article.