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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.
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."
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