NZ Herald
British soldiers fighting 'appalling' hospital care
LONDON - A shocking picture of neglect and the appalling treatment of wounded British troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan emerged yesterday in a remarkable series of letters from soldiers' families.
The sheaf of complaints, passed on by deeply alarmed senior military sources, claims soldiers have been deprived of adequate pain relief and emotional support, and in some cases are unable to sleep because of night-time noise in the tax-funded National Health Service (NHS) facilities caring for them.
The NHS said it had launched an inquiry into the complaints.
British troops petrol bombed
One letter sent to the Ministry of Defence and NHS 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 air mattress was allowed to deflate, leaving him in "considerable pain" overnight despite an alarm going off. Another complaint says one serviceman suffered more than 14 hours in agony without pain relief because no relevant staff were on duty.
Months after the row over mixed military-civilian wards, the new revelations open potentially more serious allegations concerning the level of treatment being provided to seriously injured troops.
The revelations also follow the recent scandal surrounding conditions at the Americans' flagship domestic military hospital, the Walter Reed Army Medical Centre in Washington, which prompted President George W. Bush to order a review of US military hospitals.
Details of the complaints regarding British soldiers' care provoked shock and indignation both from Opposition politicians and senior military figures.
Tony Blair's long-time Chief of Defence Staff, Lord Charles Guthrie, said the letters revealed a "scandalous" failure of care which the Government and the military had an "urgent" duty to fix. In remarks that will be seen as damning given his personal friendship with the Prime Minister, Guthrie added: "The handling of the medical casualties from both Afghanistan and Iraq is a scandal."
He said the blame did not lie with NHS staff, but with a "lack of leadership and drive" by senior military medical officers and Government ministers in addressing the need to provide purely military-run care for at least the most serious casualties.
Guthrie said that Blair and other senior figures who had visited Selly Oak had been misled about the level of care currently being provided.
"They were presented with a whitewashed version," he said.
Top military and political leaders, Guthrie added, "seem more interested in finding excuses for why things are not good than in correcting them".
The opposition Conservative Party defence spokesman, Liam Fox, accused the Government of "an act of betrayal against our bravest soldiers". Fox will raise the issue in the House of Commons this week.
Sue Freeth, welfare director for the Royal British Legion of ex-service personnel, which has 600,000 members, revealed they had, for the first time in its 86-year-history, put forward a motion questioning medical treatment for troops. She said: "We are very concerned about treatment. We know that the MoD policy department are trying to address it but some of the areas are beyond their control."
The complaints include an impassioned protest from the parents of Cooper, 18, the youngest British soldier injured in Iraq, detailing a series of alleged lapses in his care at Selly Oak.
Their son, the letter concludes, had been "sent to Iraq straight from training with no real military knowledge and [is] not receiving the care and attention that is needed for his recovery".
A letter from the mother of another soldier treated at Selly Oak, Corporal Alex Weldon, speaks of "grubby" surroundings, unbearable noise levels and inadequate visiting facilities and concludes: "Surely the rest of us - family members, military personnel or hospital staff and authorities, have a duty of care to these brave men and women."
A further five-page document is from Weldon himself, written on behalf of a number of wounded soldiers on the ward after having thought "long and hard" about doing so. It complains of repeated failures to give adequate and timely pain relief and insensitive comments by consultants.
Another letter is a handwritten plea for help sent last week from the mother of 22-year-old Ben Parkinson, who was injured in Afghanistan. It accuses the military of breaking a promise to give him a place in a military rehabilitation facility at Headley Court in Surrey. She says both she and her husband have now had to abandoned work in order to care for their son at the London area civilian hospital where he has been sent.
An MoD spokesman said: "The decision to care for military patients within specialist NHS units was driven by medical advice - the severity and complexity of modern military injuries requires ... specialist medical and nursing care, which can only be found in a few large hospital complexes in the UK, such as Birmingham."
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/2/story.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10428254
British soldier escapes burning warrior
The fresh agonies of our returning soldiers
(Guardian UK)
They served their country in Iraq and received terrible injuries. Now back in hospital in Britain, an appalling picture of their treatment has been uncovered by an Observer investigation into a growing scandal
Mark Townsend and Ned Temko
Sunday March 11, 2007
The Observer
Jamie Cooper begged for his colostomy bag to be emptied. In all, he asked three nurses. One said she had no idea how to help. Another promised to pass on his request. His parents watched the plight of their wounded soldier. He may as well have begged for his dignity.
Cooper had served, and nearly died for, his country. Shrapnel had sliced through his stomach after a mortar attack in Basra last November. He remains the youngest British serviceman wounded in Iraq. Now the 18-year-old was struggling to have his faeces removed at the Birmingham hospital that treats the most seriously wounded from Iraq and Afghanistan. Finally his parents could take no more: they emptied the bag themselves.
Article continues
'We went to the store room, helped ourselves to the necessary equipment and proceeded to clean out the colostomy bag - a task too onerous for staff,' Phillip and Caroline Cooper wrote in a letter last month to senior military leaders and NHS staff, which has been obtained by The Observer.
The Royal Green Jacket rifleman remains at Selly Oak Hospital, the sprawling NHS complex in south Birmingham where the most serious of Britain's returning wounded are treated. The lucky ones arrive at ward S4, where nurses attend to two six-bed bays in a 'military-managed' unit. Some are treated alongside civilians, removed from the camaraderie of wounded colleagues. Six months after the heated row over the suitability of placing wounded troops in mixed-civilian wards, Selly Oak is facing far more serious allegations. Letters obtained by The Observer have been called into question the treatment afforded to Britain's injured troops. The claims have provoked fresh consternation over how Britain treats its war-wounded and uncomfortable questions for a government embroiled in two bloody conflicts.
Weeks after the scandal surrounding shoddy conditions at America's flagship military hospital, the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, the British government faces its own crisis over a hospital where hundreds of wounded service personnel have arrived since the Iraq invasion four years ago.
An extraordinary sheaf of letters sent to the Ministry of Defence and the NHS and passed on by military sources to The Observer chronicles a series of alleged failings in basic care and services given to UK soldiers. Among them are claims that troops have been denied pain relief after wards ran out of supplies. On one occasion, wounded soldiers were allegedly forced to wait more than 12 hours for pain-relieving medication.
One letter of complaint from anxious parents, dated 24 February, suggests that wounded soldiers may be suffering more than is necessary in Selly Oak.
The operation on their son finished at 8pm and left their son in 'acute agony'. His ordeal had only just begun.
'The pain team is only on duty 9am to 5pm and it was only at 10.30am the next day that his pain was addressed. Presumably the call-out is too expensive,' wrote one couple from Oxfordshire.
In separate correspondence, Alex Wheldon of 45 Commando Royal Marines claims that his pain relief in Selly Oak 'arrived two-and-a-half hours late' and even then was incomplete. Another 45 minutes passed before the corporal received his designated dosage.
Other letters suggest soldiers may have received the wrong tablets. On another, 12-hour pain-relief tablets were not issued because supplies were exhausted. Wheldon, who spent weeks in ward S4 earlier this year after being shot fighting the Taliban, describes a fellow soldier from Afghanistan in such agony on the ward that it 'brought tears to his eyes'. Wheldon alleges that hospital staff implied the soldier's suffering was imaginary. 'Certain staff seemed to think it was a psychological problem and made him go and speak to a 'shrink. But it was physical,' he adds.
Cooper, too, is alleged to have suffered pain and humiliation during his treatment. In one instance, four days before last Christmas, the teenager was denied pain-relief because of a lack of qualified trained staff, according to the letter from his parents.
Though help was eventually forthcoming, they say, the problems remained. 'When they [the pills] were administered, Jamie was given the wrong tablets,' his parents wrote. The family, from Bristol, says that, during their son's stay in Selly Oak, his colostomy bag was twice allowed to overflow. During the night of 29 November, he was forced to lie in his faeces. His wounds, according to his parents' testimony, actually worsened following his life-saving operation, the pressure sores on his heel deteriorating so much that he required skin-grafts.
Twenty days from now, the last of Britain's military hospitals will close. Little more than a decade ago, Britain had eight such institutions. During the First World War, there were 20, with at least 9,200 beds reserved for soldiers.
'We will be the only country in the civilised world without a dedicated military hospital', said Hampshire councillor Peter Edgar, who is campaigning against the imminent closure of the Royal Naval Hospital Haslar in Gosport.
The withdrawal of MoD funding comes as casualties steadily mount in Afghanistan and Iraq. Four British soldiers have been killed in Helmand in the past eight days. So far, more than 5,500 wounded have been airlifted back to Britain for treatment.
About 800 are understood to have passed through Selly Oak. Wheldon had seen enough after three weeks in ward S4. His complaints, written during his stay at the hospital, are not merely his own. His detailed litany of concerns are echoed by 'every' other patient soldier he met at Selly Oak, headquarters of the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine.
All were exhausted during their time at the hospital. Wheldon managed a maximum of four hours' sleep because of the incessant clattering of bins and trolleys by auxiliary nurses and civilian staff throughout the night. The repercussions, wrote the corporal, were more damaging than simply a lack of rest.
'The military men from Afghanistan and Iraq jump with shock,' Wheldon said. 'A sudden crash or bang goes through you, especially for us who have been mortared or been under heavy fire. It is a subconscious reaction which isn't very pleasant.'
Wheldon describes how an army sergeant once almost leapt out of his bed with fright. It is indicative, he writes, of a perceived lack of respect and understanding by the NHS towards armed forces families in Selly Oak. 'An army patient in my bay, a casualty from Iraq, had not seen his wife or baby son for five months. They were due to arrive, after a four-hour journey, earlier than the visiting time allows. He was told they would have to wait until the designated time.'
Wheldon's mother also complained of shabby treatment. Her letter, dated 16 February, claims that the visitor room for military families 'appears to be more of a store room for large equipment' and that it was so cramped 'there is not really enough room for more than one family'. And it was grubby, she notes: 'Could it not be cleaner? The overall impression I have got is one of untidiness and grubbiness on the ward'.
Cooper contracted MRSA twice while he was in Selly Oak. His parents were left in little doubt that 'there is a need to reinforce simple measures in hygiene'. Yet, still no one knows how many British troops have caught the infection after returning to Britain. The MoD, in a parliamentary answer last week, explains that no central figures are available.
Food given to wounded troops is also described as inadequate in the letters. On arriving at Selly Oak, Wheldon was told that a decent diet would promote healing. He writes of 'stale sandwiches' and being forced to buy his own meals at the hospital canteen. Some issues seem easily avoidable. Wheldon describes how one soldier was told by a Selly Oak consultant before an operation that 'his military career could be over'. He adds: 'A simple sentence like that, can, and did, have a profound effect on the man's mental state.'
Perhaps Wheldon could count himself fortunate in one respect. At least he had comrades for company. Cooper's misery was compounded by his isolation in a room with no television or radio for distraction. 'We would, if possible, have taken our son into private care. However, if we had done so, then he would have been classed as AWOL,' his parents wrote.
Sometimes, though, company can prove troublesome. The Oxfordshire parents describe how their son was rudely disturbed one night in Selly Oak. 'It is outrageous that an injured soldier should be disturbed at night by a disorientated geriatric trying to get into his bed in error.'
Isolation can sap a soldier's spirit. In a letter dated 5 March to Prince Charles and senior commanders, a parent from Doncaster claims that her son is suffering after being sent to an NHS hospital in Putney, rather than the military's rehabilitation centre.
The woman recently gave up her career to look after her seriously wounded 22-year-old son, who is in 7 Parachute Regiment, Royal Horse Artillery. 'Surely there is a place at Headley Court [a specialist military treatment centre] for a boy such as Ben, who has sacrificed so much for his country?'
Wheldon received a reply from the head of the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine on 22 February. It admits that 'many of the matters you raise are known' and said they would be investigated.
Days earlier, the Coopers received a response. A formal investigation is under way into their complaints. 'Your son will never be just another statistic to RCDM,' they were assured.
Some remain unconvinced. As Wheldon concludes: 'We've just spent four months fighting in the chaos of another world, where every day you risk losing your life at any moment. There's no way we would ever ask for sympathy; that is not our style. All we ask for is understanding'.
Abe Lincoln's Antiwar Record
