What happened
In October 2023 BBC Wales reported the account of an approved mental health professional working in Wales, whose name the BBC changed. She was preparing a Mental Health Act assessment of a client with a history of violence when unwell. Before the visit she rang the police to ask for their support, which is what AMHPs do when the risk is high. She was told to ring 999 if something happened.
She went ahead with the assessment. During it she was punched. The 999 call came after the attack, not before it.
“Often the presence of police will de-escalate people,” she said. She said it could have been prevented.
The outcome
None, in the sense these pages usually mean. No prosecution is recorded, and the account was published as a worker’s story inside a policy argument, not as a case with a finding.
BASW Cymru said the direction of policy, under which police attendance at mental health call-outs was being reduced, put staff in “grave danger”. A member of its national committee said the new scheme would put professionals at grave risk. A second social worker told the BBC that AMHPs would “probably die in the future”, and that police support had become hard to get even where there was evidence of weapons. The Police Federation called BASW’s language “disappointing”.
What went wrong
What she did was right. She read the history, judged the risk high, and asked for the resource that goes with it. The answer was a telephone number to use once the risk had turned into an assault.
That is not a control. A 999 call is a response to violence. It cannot de-escalate a room, it cannot arrive before the punch, and its timing is not in her hands.
The sources leave out a lot. Nothing says whether the refusal was written down, whether her employer’s risk assessment had anywhere to record support that had been declined, whether anyone senior authorised going ahead, or whether the assessment could have waited for a day when police would attend. The account is hers alone.
What it teaches
A risk assessment a worker cannot act on is paperwork. The test of a lone worker system is not what it says about high-risk visits. It is what happens on the afternoon the support is refused: who is told, who decides, and what the worker is entitled to do instead.
Two things would have changed this case. A named person with authority to postpone, reachable at short notice. And a written record of a declined request that travels above the worker, so the decision belongs to the organisation, not to the person on the doorstep.
Questions for the room
- If you ask for police support and are told to ring 999 if something happens, what does your policy say you do next?
- Who in your organisation can postpone an assessment, and would they answer the phone at four in the afternoon?
- Is a refused request for support recorded anywhere, and who reads it?
- What would have to be true for you to walk away and go home?
Evidence and limits
Confidence: probable. One source: a BBC Wales report from October 2023. The vault marks a case confirmed only where two independent sources exist, and this one rests on a single report and one worker’s account of her own case. No source gives the date of the assault, so none is stated here. Her name was changed by the BBC and is not used, or guessed at, on this page. The police response is known only as she describes it.
Our lone working training covers what a risk assessment has to do when the support it depends on is refused.
Sources
- BBC Wales, 2023 · https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-66997629
Reviewed 20 October 2026.