A shocking picture of neglect and the appalling treatment of wounded British troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan emerged on Saturday night in a remarkable series of letters from soldiers' families.
The sheaf of complaints, passed on by deeply alarmed senior military sources, claims that 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 on Saturday night that it had launched an inquiry into the complaints.
One letter sent to the Ministry of Defense (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.
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 US' flagship domestic military hospital, the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, which prompted US President George W. Bush to order a review of the nation's military hospitals.
Details of the complaints regarding British soldiers' care last night provoked shock and indignation both from opposition politicians and senior military figures. British Prime Minister Tony Blair's long-time Chief of Defense 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."
The opposition Conservative party defense 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 and seek an urgent reply from Defense Secretary Des Browne on each of the cases raised in the letters.
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.
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