POLICE are revolutionising the front line in mental health care to unclog accident and emergency units, save officer time and help some of Scotland's most vulnerable people.

The national force and the country's biggest NHS board are spearheading a new relationship that will see psychiatric nurses and officers work more closely than ever before.

Their community triage pilot, launched across Greater Glasgow, should cut the vast amount of time police and casualty doctors spend dealing with distressed people they encounter, especially at night.

Chief Inspector Rosie Wright, who is championing the pilot, said she did not believe that the current system was helping those experiencing deeply distressing episodes , despite it eating up police and NHS resources.

The area commander said: "The books are just not balancing."

Her alternative - backed by NHS experts - is for officers to call in a team of out-of-hours mental health nurses to triage or assess people who are threatening self-harm or behaving in a worrying way.

Then a decision can be made on whether they just need some cooling off time - or whether they have to go to hospital.

NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde has had such an out-of-hours team for more than a decade but most officers were unaware of its existence - and were taking people to A&E instead of making use of it.

Ms Wright has been briefing officers across Greater Glasgow of the project.

Explaining the new scheme to an entire shift in the city centre, she asked officers how often they dealt with mentally distressed people."Is it becoming increasingly part of your duties?" They all nodded. "Especially on the nightshift," replied one.

Ms Wright stressed her priority was providing a better and more proportionate service to those suffering. But she made it clear that having NHS backing could make a huge difference to police resources.

"The most important thing is how we help distressed people," she told officers. "I hope that the outcomes of this will they get a better service, as opposed to sitting in hospital for a full shift with you guys only to be told that there is nothing clinically wrong with them.

"And you are left unsupported, wondering what to do now."

Charlie Goldie, who leads the current out-of-hours team at NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, stressed that most people who suffer episodes of mental ill-health did not have some long-term underlying problem.

A similar scheme in Teeside, north-east England, has seen a dramatic reduction in the number of people detained by the police under the Mental Health Act.

Cleveland Police, in the first year of its "street triage" pilot, detained just 12 people out of the 371 people assessed by its NHS partners. That is just over three per cent.

In the year before it began its pilot, in August 2012, some 224 people were detained, nearly 90 per cent of whom were later found to have no significant mental health disorder.

If replicated in Scotland, this would make a huge difference to under-pressure front line services in both the police and the NHS.

The Glasgow pilot will end in June before being assessed. A major conference is planned for later in the year to see whether it should be extended across Scotland.

With both the police and the NHS under severe financial pressures - and accident and emergencies said to be close to crisis - senior public-sector figures are understood to be very interested in the outcome of the pilot.

Ms Wright, however, stressed that triage was "not a fix-all".

She told officers. "If you are called to someone in a crisis situation, perhaps threatening suicide, then it's not for that.

"It is more slow-time incident, somebody threatening to self harm.

"It should provide you with more tools and save resource time."