Celebrating Success: End of Project Webinar Highlights
The Supporting Armed Forces in Acute Hospital Settings Programme Evaluation webinar brought together representatives from NHS England, NHS Trusts, and Health Boards, Armed Forces Advocates – the role created through the programme – and our evaluators from the University of Chester.
A jam-packed agenda covered the findings from the evaluation, including:
- The Armed Forces Advocate role was originally designed as bedside support but often extended into the community too.
- The role was also used to improve knowledge of Armed Forces amongst NHS staff.
- Identification of Veterans was a common challenge and was handled in several ways by the different Trusts including using visual clues and introducing digital infrastructure.
- The involvement and support of the Armed Forces Advocate role delivered cost savings for many Trusts.
The East Lancs experience:
Sid Sadiq and Fiona Lamb from East Lancashire NHS Trust shared their experience of the programme and the cost saving it incurred. Sid explained: “Once we had completed the project, we worked out the average cost of what the project had provided for East Lancashire Hospital, and taking into consideration how much it costs for a patient to be in, and the homeless Veterans that we put into accommodation, placements and various other things, it worked out we’d saved about 378 bed days. That’s equal to about £250,000 saved for the NHS within East Lancashire hospitals itself.”
East Lancashire NHS Trust has offered support to other Trusts to help them get started – including everything from educating staff on what constitutes a Veteran and a Veteran family, to creating and implementing e-learning modules on Armed Forces community support.
They estimate they are supporting around 1,400 Armed Forces community patients at any one time, including community patients.
Wise words from Wales:
Zoe Roberts, Armed Forces Covenant and Veterans Healthcare Lead for Betsi Cadwaladr Health Board and Maisy Provan, her counterpart for Cardiff and Vale University Health Board, have taken a joint approach to delivering the programme.
Zoe talked about their system of identifying Veterans in their hospital settings.
“We coined the poppy programme here in the north, which meant we started asking the question in a formal capacity on our patient admission processes. We rolled the poppy program out to all admission areas across our three acute district hospitals and in the south, this was later implemented on… the elderly care wards and their day surgeries.”
They have also focused on staff training. Signposting to their local Armed Forces Liaison Officer dealt with the issue of the Armed Forces Advocate’s capacity, allowing them to use their time to implement a training package as part of the induction process for the Health Board in the south, and establish an Armed Forces network in both areas.
Maisy added: “Word of mouth has massively helped. I know in Cardiff, getting those staff talking and allowing that kind of process to continue and getting people’s interest sparked and trying to make it relatable. For example, ‘How does knowing about these patients and knowing about their needs help you as a clinician?’”
Steps forward in Scotland
In Scotland, both NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde and NHS Lothian decided to partner with the Defence Medical Welfare Service to implement the project.
Margaret Partridge, Veterans Support Coordinator for Greater Glasgow, and Clyde told us: “Some of the support that people received was life changing. There are people, genuinely, who said to us that they wouldn’t be around today if they hadn’t had the help of a DMWS welfare officer at the time.
“We were able to deliver services to 201 Veterans during the pilot project. We also picked up and recorded the benefits in terms of wider family members.
“This might be reducing the impact on them perhaps in terms of bedside visiting, but also in terms of reducing some of the anxiety around putting in place liaison with health and social care partnership colleagues, social services, if they didn’t feel able to do that. 145 NHS staff also benefited from our support. Overall, there were 659 beneficiaries as a result of the initial pilot.”
In Lothian, they also engaged with more Veterans than planned. Currently, with improved methods of identification, they are supporting around 30-40 Veterans a month.
National notes from NHS England
Debra Elliot, Director of Armed Forces Health Commissioning for NHS England, talked about the purpose of the programme being proof of concept: and that job is done. But what else has NHS England learned?
“It’s fantastic that some NHS Trusts embedded the Veteran identification into the electronic systems. It’s something we’ll be picking up on.
“Raised awareness about what support Veterans could get from, not just NHS community services, but the Armed Forces charities – without whom we wouldn’t be able to do our job in the NHS as effectively.
“Securing support from external agencies so people are more independent; and staff training throughout most of the initiatives. We will be taking this learning forward.”
NHS England has teamed up with the Veterans Healthcare Alliance and is setting out a national training and education program in England for all organisations within the NHS, social care and other support, to help their acute and NHS GPs, and also the Integrated Care Boards (ICBs), to develop a skilled, educated and inclusive workforce to meet the evolving needs of the Armed Forces community.
“We are working with the ICBs over the next two years around the Armed Forces Covenant and what that means for the wider NHS, and why statutory bodies need to adhere to and comply with it. We are in the process of developing a tool that the ICBs will be able to use so that they can demonstrate that they are giving due regard to the Armed Forces community. We’ll be refreshing the integrated personalised care for Veterans for those who are badly injured or have very complex care. We’ll work very closely with DMWS on this, and MOD, and we’ll be sharing the learning from this programme.”
Into innovation for Cheshire and Merseyside:
Carl Marsh, Place Director, NHS Cheshire and Merseyside, talked more about the work of the ICBs to bring together an Armed Forces Network with representation from each place within it.
“We have a network for Veterans, for Reservists, for cadet instructors. We have a really active and engaged mums’ network, which is a support network for mums who have children serving in the Armed Forces. When mum’s children deploy, they can help each other through some of those challenging circumstances.”
Carl explained that about 60% of their approx. 300 GP practices, are ‘Veteran Friendly’ or ‘Veteran Aware’ accredited.
Questions to the panel
As always, we took attendees’ questions, which covered an array of issues from making training mandatory to whether the Armed Forces Advocate model should be rolled out to more Trusts. You can listen to the full Q&A session at the recording below.
Find out more
A huge thank you to all of our speakers who made this such an informative event.
Couldn’t make it? You can watch the webinar recording at the link below, read the evaluation report here or look back at the original guidance for this programme for more information here.
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Full webinar recording in our Knowledge Network