The nurse specialist's collaborative experience with the police in a prehospital emergency psychiatric unit : A qualitative interview study

Since 2015, a prehospital emergency psychiatric unit has been established in Sweden to address the growing mental illness issues and similar co-response models exist around the world.Collaboration with the police is an important part of their work to provide good care to patients.The aim of the current study was to explore nurse specialists' experience of collaboration with the police in prehospital emergency psychiatric unit.A descriptive qualitative design with ten semi-structured interviews was conducted and analyzed using qualitative content analysis.The results showed that the nurses experienced a wellfunctioning collaboration with good communication and mutual respect.However, poor communication, mistrust, and different perspectives on laws and what mental illness meant was negatively affecting collaboration.Furthermore, organizational difficulties were identified where the police lacked knowledge about mental illness.Effective collaboration between police and prehospital emergency psychiatric unit was crucial for patient care.This study could improve collaboration, recommending improvements by joint training, better legal and mental illness education for the police.Future research should prioritize the police's perspective while also providing concrete measures to enhance collaboration.