As the NHS pick up and run with the veteran health care ball (Operation Courage), I am beginning to wonder if we actually need a service charity sector?

It’s fantastic to see hundreds of isolated veterans now accessing professional help and support from the plethora of expert practioners already embedded in the NHS. Its long overdue, and I like many others can’t quite get my head around where it went wrong in the first place. One of the reasons we didn’t have, until recently, a Department for Veterans Affairs, (a development I really support by the way) was because the NHS was designed to pick up all the holistic health needs of returning veterans when it formed on 5th july 1948.

In its short tenure, the UK Department for Veterans Affairs has, in just over four years managed to put veterans back in the position they should have been in at the end of World War Two. Perhaps that’s because there just wasn’t anyone back then to champion the cause of veterans other than a small group of service charities that were formed at the end of WW1. These charities picked up the tab for Government and operated, in the main, via a network of volunteer support. The landscape really changed when ‘Help for Heroes’ stepped into the service charity arena to meet the unmet needs of veterans who were seriously injured in both Iraq & Afghanistan. It was a game changer.

Lets not forget the old guard didn’t like it, but the great British public knew all too well that veterans were for all intents and purposes, dumped when they left the military. When I was growing up my Father and Great Grandfather both suffered from depression, alcohol misuse and episodes of violent behaviour. Yet, no one made the link between their service in WW1 & WW2. Like others, they would never talk about their time in the services.

It’s only now as I search my family tree that I find out that they were both in the thick of in France 20014-18 and Europe 1944 -45. As they returned home, thousands of veterans were told to get on with their lives and suffer in silence, many living in poverty and having to take any work they could to survive. Interestingly, in my house the only person to be given medication for depression was my Mother and that was due to trying to cope with my Fathers explosive anger issues and violence.

I predict that as care planning and coordinated care pathways become the norm veterans will eventually, of their own volition, gravitate towards the various support services that are being developed in the NHS to meet individual veteran need. This is a good thing. The need for veterans charities to identify, engage and connect with specialist NHS services will become redundant as, quite rightly, veterans take responsibility for accessing their own health care needs. A similar process is happening in the States as thousands of Vietnam Veterans gravitate back to the free health care provided by the US Dept Veterans Affairs after years of rejecting the services on offer.

Simultaneously, the NHS will, as it collects data become more savvy at identifying the causal factors of some of the presenting issues. At the moment veterans are viewed as an homogenous group and bizarrely, the general public are under the misguided impression that all veterans are combat veterans with PTSD. Nothing could be further from the truth and it will become apparent in due course, as we enter another economic downturn, that millions of pounds are spent on those who meet the criteria of Veteran simply because of the anachronistic misnomer of ‘one days service’. I would like to see this criteria reclassified so that funding reaches those that need it most.

Someone should ask the large charities just how much is spent annually on individuals with under 12 weeks service? It will be interesting and shocking data.

What will also become apparent, is that the vast majority claiming monetary support cannot attribute the cause of their problems with any aspect of Military Service. Yet the cash cow keeps on paying up and as one veteran said …”If the cows there… milk it ” This has to stop.

We need to ensure that those that deserve a gold star service get a gold star service.

Tony Wright CEO