Tom, you so succintly put how ambos throughout the country are infuriated by the crap way that people with a history of Mental Illness are dealt with when they are 'in a crisis'. i have given up counting how many times I have tried to get in touch with 'Crisis Teams' or named C.P.N.s (Community Psychiatric Nurses ) only to be told that patients can't be assessed as they have consumed alcohol! FFS they may well have had a can of lager but that doesn't make them drunk or un-assessable. And I'm sorry to say to Delcatto that the behaviour by the nurse that Tom described is not unusual, in fact it is more the norm in my 28 years of ambo work. Though I must admit the idea of having a Crisis team or some psychiatric liason staff in an A+E 24/7 sounds like a good idea. On another point I'm pretty sure that my Trust, just west of Heathrow, recently put out a document, but originally from another agency, maybe the DoH, that clearly stated that A+E Depts were now no longer considered 'places of safety'.