Scandal of treatment for wounded Iraq veterans
As George Bush faces criticism for the conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Centre, Tony Blair is coming under attack for the level of care being provided for wounded British soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Here in the UK the soldiers are treated at Selly Oak Hospital in Birmingham where civilians are also treated.
The Observer newspaper have obtained a collection of letters from soldiers treated at Selly Oak outlining the conditions that they are enduring. It makes for horrific reading:
The fact that these men are not even being given adequate pain relief is simply scandalous, so much so that even some of Blair's strongest allies have come out publicly against him.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.
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.
Indeed, things are so bad that the Royal British Legion, 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. Sue Freeth, their welfare director 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.'Tony Blair's long-time Chief of Defence Staff, Lord 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 particularly 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'.
It is stories like this that makes one aware of how little concern Blair and others actually have for these young men and women that they send off to fight their wars. One would think that, having risked life and limb, that only the very best medical treatment would be acceptable when they return home horrifically wounded. Here in the UK, we are not even treating them in specialist army facilities.
And the idea that people are lying in pain denied medication because there were no staff on duty simply beggars belief.
They say you can judge how civilised any society is by the way it treats it's prisoners. What does it say about us, if this is the way we treat our war wounded?
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