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British troops wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan are receiving appalling care in British hospitals

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133724 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Mar-12-07 03:38 AM
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British troops wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan are receiving appalling care in British hospitals
LONDON, March 11 -- British troops wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan are receiving appalling care in British hospitals, according to families who have made complaints similar to those leveled against Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington.

"We gloriously see them off to war and then neglect them when they come back," said Phillip Cooper, whose son, Jamie, 18, is a soldier who was severely injured in a mortar attack in Iraq in November. "They lay down their lives for their country, then they get treated appallingly."

Detailing a long list of problems in a telephone interview, Cooper said his son's colostomy bag has twice been allowed to overflow, forcing him to lie in his own feces. On one occasion, Cooper said, he and his wife changed the bag themselves after nurses on duty at the Selly Oak Hospital in Birmingham, Britain's principal medical center tending to wounded soldiers, said they did not know how.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/11/AR2007031100610.html

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CJCRANE Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Mar-12-07 05:41 AM
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1. Whatever B*sh can do
Blair can do better...worse...
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Horse with no Name Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Mar-12-07 05:56 AM
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2. I'd tend to believe this was an isolated incident
designed to soften the outrage of Walter Reed.
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muriel_volestrangler Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Mar-12-07 06:26 AM
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3. There has been some complaints about the conditions before
Edited on Mon Mar-12-07 06:30 AM by muriel_volestrangler
mainly about being mixed in wards with civilian patients - but the treatment wasn't great eiher. From last September:

One soldier recovering from a gunshot wound has described how he spent three weeks in a bed next to a mentally handicapped man who was unable to care for or clean himself.

Another soldier at the hospital recalled one of his comrades who had lost a leg screaming in agony because the morphine had worn off. The pain was so intense that the soldier fainted twice during the 45 minutes he had to wait before a doctor could be found to administer more morphine.

The soldier said that civilians on the ward, many of them pensioners, had been deeply upset.

It is also understood that servicemen traumatised by seeing comrades killed in action have waited up to five weeks before they being offered any form of psychiatric counselling.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/09/17/ntroops17.xml


And in January, the Mirror newspaper was complaining that British treatment of the wounded was worse than the Amercian: http://www.sundaymirror.co.uk/news/tm_headline=exclusive--our-heroes-betrayed&method=full&objectid=18541495&siteid=62484-name_page.html
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