A National Train-the-Trainer Program to Enhance Police Response to Veterans With Mental Health Issues: Primary Officer and Trainer Outcomes and Material Dissemination

Impact Statement Across a wide range of regions and jurisdictions, police can improve in mental health knowledge as well as skills in identifying psychological services and related treatment resource options and collaborating with mental health professionals, even when they are mandated to training versus volunteering. Such positive outcomes may require that trainers work in highly trained, multidisciplinary teams. Access to curriculum materials used to achieve these outcomes is provided in this article. Law enforcement officers (LEOs) may play the most important role in directing people in mental health crises into treatment versus incarceration. While most military veterans will never experience a crisis interaction with LEOs, they represent an important at-risk target group for whom to enhance LEO response. The evidence supporting LEO crisis training models includes important limitations that stem from jurisdiction-limited studies, and emphasize LEOs who volunteer for mental health training. The current study reports the primary outcomes of a national (U.S.) large-scale mandated train-the-trainer program to enhance VA LEO response to military veterans with mental health issues. Multidisciplinary teams comprised of VA LEOs, Veterans Justice Outreach Specialists, and mental health professionals (n = 245) were trained in two nested waves. Both trainers and endpoint LEOs (n = 1,284) improved from pretest to posttest on knowledge and skills in identifying psychological services and related treatment referral resources and cross-discipline collaboration, the latter of which showed some retention at 3-month follow-up. The findings support the potential for LEOs mandated to training to improve in important prerequisites to diverting people with mental health issues into care, and away from the criminal justice system. Such results may require professional trainers of LEOs who have themselves received relevant specific training. Potential cautions of such an approach, including inter-team differences and potential for publication bias in extant literature, are also elucidated by the current methodology. The links to all of the collaboratively-developed curriculum materials from the current study are provided for use by qualified professionals.