Every year, law enforcement agencies register about 40,000 crimes, for the prevention and detailed detection of which data about the person’s health condition and mental disorders are often required. Recent high-profile events have highlighted the need for information exchange between the police and the healthcare system regarding individuals who pose a threat to others.
«Ensuring public safety is a shared responsibility of the police and medicine. In close cooperation with healthcare professionals, we need to develop a modern algorithm that will help the police react or prevent crimes in a timely manner if the suspect is suffering from mental disorders,» said Minister of Internal Affairs A. Bilotaite.
Today, medical workers are obliged to inform the head of a medical institution within five working days about changes in the mental health of a firearm owner, and the management of the medical institution is obliged to pass this information to the police, which issues and revokes firearm permits.
Reducing bureaucratic burden on the police and medical institutions
According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, it would be expedient to integrate the E-health electronic healthcare system with the police incident registry. This will help the police to obtain information about whether a person registered at the scene of an incident has any mental or behavioral disorders. Police officers will be able to choose and plan their response tactics in advance.
The police will also benefit from automated information from the E-health system regarding the registration of individuals involved in criminal or administrative proceedings and their visits to a specific medical institution. Thus, investigators will be able to contact a specific institution, rather than all of them, to obtain data about a specific person.
According to the Ministry of Health, these changes will help reduce the bureaucratic burden on both the police and medical institutions. Together with the improvement of the electronic healthcare system, they can be introduced by the end of this year, and data transmission will then be automatic.
