Mental Health Services: Veterans
(asked on 22nd May 2018) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what estimate he has made of the cost to the public purse of mental health support for veterans in each of the last five years.
Most services for most veterans are delivered without their veteran status being reported centrally. Some data is available for some veteran specific services.
The number of referrals to separately identified veteran specific services, including both care and signposting, veterans identified in general Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) services and the resources allocated in England are in the following table.
| 2013/14 | 2014/15 | 2015/16 | 2016/17 |
Veteran Specific services | 3,005 | 3,632 | 5,073 | 5,374 |
Identified veteran in IAPT | 16,050 | 15,490 | 19,020 | 20,005 |
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Allocated Resource (£ million) | 4.7 | 4.7 | 6.4 | 6.4 |
In order to improve and strengthen the offer to veterans, during 2016 NHS England carried out a comprehensive review of mental health services for veterans. Feedback from veterans and their families led to significant improvements in the commissioning of services.
In 2017 NHS England launched the Veterans Mental Health Transition, Intervention and Liaison Service (TILs) which increases access and treatment to appropriate and timely mental health services for both armed forces serving personnel approaching discharge and veterans with mental health difficulties.
NHS England also launched the Veterans Mental Health Complex Treatment Service in April 2018, which builds on the launch of TILs and provides an enhanced service for veterans who have military-attributable complex mental health problems that have not been resolved earlier in the care/support pathway.