The Issue:

A vulnerable person (JD) lives on her own and is from Nigeria. She came to the UK with her then husband and children however the relationship broke down and JD moved into a house on her own.

JD has various medical issues and is a heavy drinker. She lives a very chaotic lifestyle and cannot deal with stress or change. When JD has these moments in her life she will drink even more to excess resulting in very concerning behaviour.

A major aspect of this behaviour is to call the emergency services via 999. The calls vary from drunken incoherent shouting to threats of harming herself. In the past 12 months this has amounted to 204 incidents.

Officers have attended on many occasions dealing with the issues concerned often receiving verbal and physical abuse themselves and at a significant cost to the public purse.

The Approach:

JD was recognised as vulnerable and an ECINS case was established. Much work has been carried out to try and combat this deteriorating trend.

ECINS has facilitated the management of the case and the sharing of information with partners involved which has proven crucial.

The Solution:

JD initially was a success story due to the engagement however this turned out to be the calm before the storm.

As the case escalated more JD became a significant VPP case and still is to this date.

ECINS is central to the management of VPP cases and is used to keep track of VPP meetings and tasks in managing such cases forward. The interventions managed through ECINS has prevented further costs being added in personnel hours, saving tens of thousands.

Currently JD has been involved in criminal matters as a result of her behaviour and she is now facing enforcement both criminally and civilly.

Without ECINS this case would have been harder to manage thus increasing the risk to JD and also victims of her behaviour locally.

Cost Savings Through Partnership Sharing

Sergeant Simon Scales of Nottinghamshire Police, who was involved in the case said “This case is ongoing and complex. The generic overview of having a shared system certainly highlights risks sooner due to the organic movement of information between partnerships which in turn reduces costs.

One of these savings is taking cases from the top of the vulnerability triangle where they need a high level of support and reducing the vulnerability through closer partnership work to a point where the vulnerable person is self-sufficient thus reducing costs to care for them.

The interventions managed through ECINS reduced the hoax calls for a period of time and in just this one case saved tens of thousands in relation to officers attending and managing the calls centrally through our call handlers.”