As the U.S. follows problems surrounding the care of American Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, recent news from the United Kingdom shows the British are facing similar issues. According to reports, the British National Health Service (NHS) is opening six dedicated mental health units throughout U.K. hospitals. Injured veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan will also receive "fast-track" treatment throughout the NHS, a policy previously reserved for the country's 170,000 war pensioners.
As the BBC reports:
The move to prioritise military personnel comes after soldiers and their families complained they were having trouble accessing quality care upon returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Seven of the eight military hospitals around the UK have closed since a Conservative government review in the early 1990s and the last in Haslar, Hampshire, will shut in 2009. Calls for more military hospitals to be created were rejected by this government, which argued that "top-quality treatment" was available within the NHS.
Last March the NHS was accused by veterans and their families of inadequate care in its hospital facilities.
One letter sent to the MoD and NHS managers reveals how the youngest British soldier wounded in Iraq, Jamie Cooper, was forced to spend a night lying in his own faeces after staff at Birmingham's Selly Oak Hospital allowed his colostomy bag to overflow. On another occasion his medical air mattress was allowed to deflate, leaving him in 'considerable pain' overnight despite an alarm going off.
Another complaint alleges that one serviceman suffered more than 14 hours in agony without pain relief because no relevant staff were on duty. Others claim that supplies of pain relief have run out on wards where injured troops are being cared for, and that in one instance a geriatric patient tried to climb into an injured soldier's bed by mistake.
Echoing the U.S.'s own war controversies, politicians in the U.K. recently accused Prime Minister Gordon Brown of mismanaging veterans affairs.
[A former military chief] said the Prime Minister had "let the Armed Forces down by not appointing a Secretary of State who is full-time. When you have got people who have been killed and maimed in the service of their government, and you put at the head of the shop someone who is part-time, that sends a very bad message.
"And that is the message I get back from our soldiers, our sailors and our airmen. They feel insulted, they feel that he is treating them with contempt," he said.
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