This was Grumpy Gordon's response:
The Government is committed to providing excellent medical care for the members of our armed forces. "Military hospitals" are no longer the best way to provide that care.
The numbers of our Servicemen and women who require hospital treatment are relatively small. On a typical day, there are barely enough military in-patients in the UK to fill two wards of a major NHS hospital, irrespective of where they live or work, or of the severity or type of illness or injury. To bring together all the military patients in that way would be medically wrong. It would also mean that many of these patients and their families would have to travel long distances unnecessarily, when they can receive the appropriate care closer to home.
We do, however, bring together in one place the majority of our military patients who are seriously injured overseas. Selly Oak NHS Hospital in Birmingham is now the primary reception hospital for military patients evacuated back to the UK from overseas, including casualties from Iraq and Afghanistan. That is because the hospital is nationally at the leading edge in the medical care of the complex and multiple injuries that our battle casualties typically sustain, and is well located to receive casualties flown in from overseas. Selly Oak provides a level and capacity of clinical care that our military hospitals simply could not.
As the Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Richard Dannatt, said in a BBC interview in March 2007:
"There is nowhere better in the country, nowhere more expert at polytrauma medicine, than that hospital in Selly Oak. That's why our people are there."
And we do fully accept the need for Service patients to continue to feel part of the military family. We have therefore created a Military Managed Ward within the main trauma and orthopaedic ward at Selly Oak. MOD and NHS authorities have altered the layout of the ward to produce a separate area for military patients whose condition allows them to be nursed together. A combined military and civilian team cares for these patients. The team includes military nursing managers and a military ward-master, with military nursing staff on duty on every shift.
Our operational casualties can also be treated in the other specialist units offered by NHS hospitals in Birmingham. Wherever practicable, military patients are allocated to one of the military consultants who work at Birmingham. By far the largest proportion of specialist care, however, is provided by NHS staff. This reflects the range of knowledge, skills and resources the NHS can and does offer our patients. Our current facilities at Selly Oak will become part of the Birmingham New Hospitals Project that is planned to start admitting patients to the finest healthcare facilities in Europe by 2010.
When our serious casualties are sufficiently recovered, many go on to the Defence Medical Rehabilitation Centre at Headley Court in Surrey, a world-class centre dedicated to military patients. Less serious cases may go on to one of MOD's 15 Regional Rehabilitation Units in the UK and Germany. These military units provide accessible, regionally-based assessment and treatment, including physiotherapy and group rehabilitation facilities. Hence once the crucial hospital phase is over, and patients have received the most appropriate clinical care, we provide rehabilitation for military patients in a wholly military environment.
The majority of the patients in the military hospitals that were phased out from the mid 1990s were actually civilians. Even so, military hospitals increasingly failed to offer the range and volume of cases that our military doctors, nurses and allied health professionals need, to remain at the leading edge of their professions. That is why, in addition to the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine in Birmingham, we created elsewhere in the UK, five MOD Hospital Units (MDHUs), all located within major NHS Trust hospitals, to provide experience and training for our military medical personnel. The NHS hospitals that host the MDHUs are also close to military population centres, and so can offer more "local" secondary care facilities for military patients living or working in the region.
The skills our medical staff can now gain and maintain in major NHS trauma hospitals are used in the arduous conditions of the front line and in our field hospitals, to save the lives of injured troops who would have died in similar circumstances only a decade ago.
The Defence Medical Services in the UK thus now work not in military hospitals, but in close partnership with the NHS, to deliver the treatment that our Servicemen and women deserve. Our medical personnel who deploy overseas are a mixture of Regulars and Reservists - with many of the latter themselves being NHS staff. And of course, NHS staff can provide the continuity of care when either Regular or Reserve personnel deploy from NHS facilities.
In summary, a partnership with the NHS is the best way of ensuring that Service patients continue to get the high standards of medical treatment they deserve. This partnership also plays an essential role in training and maintaining the competence of DMS uniformed staff, so that they can fulfil their primary operational role overseas. It is a partnership in which both the Defence Medical Services and the National Health Service are constantly striving to achieve the best care for our sick and injured personnel.
So that's OK then.........