Veterans’ Outreach Support: Reinforcing Success in Mind

Veterans’ Outreach Support were awarded £100,000 to enable them to meet the increased demand for, and complexity of, mental health support for veterans and families.

Their project ‘reinforcing success in mind’ is now half-way through and they have started to develop a more sustainable long term plan for their clinical output. Overall, this has been more successful in some areas than others, with notable success in engaging with stakeholders.

VOS has engaged in a varied and rigorous recruitment drive to fulfil the roles of Psychiatrist, Clinical Psychologist and Clinical Administrator to assist in the delivery of the project, however, with the employee market post COVID becoming increasingly more competitive in an already limited pool of talent it has been challenging to find suitable candidates. In October 2022, they successfully recruited an experienced Clinical Administrator with 17 years NHS experience, who has already demonstrated improved capability in delivering the clinical services within VOS.

Regular, integrated support

The organisation has continued with therapies on a weekly basis, working as an integrated team to match requests for support to a more holistic model of wellbeing, welfare and clinical support. They continue to welcome over 70 veterans monthly to their drop-in events in Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight and currently offer 1:1 therapy to service users when referral onwards to Operation Courage or other providers is not suitable.

Their project beneficiaries cover all three Services, including the merchant navy, and including some partners and spouses. A recent partner who has come forward to seek triage and potential therapy needs personal support to best support her Service veteran partner who is suffering from dementia. On completion of therapy to support substance misuse, another service user emailed the following during this reporting period:

‘Just a quick note, to let you know I am now fully fit for work, just need a few blood tests. I just want to thank you for all your help in my case, as I know at times it must of been hard, as I did not follow the advice all of the time. I feel the only reason I am still here, is because of all the work you, and the alcohol team at QA [Hospital] gave me. Many thanks, and keep up the good work, it works.’

Further Reading

Find out more about the Afghanistan Veteran Fund on our project pages, here.