NHS England
WORKING WITH ARMED FORCES FAMILIES
by Armed Forces Commissioning Team, NHS England L
ast year NHS England were given the responsibility of purchasing hospital based care for the Armed Forces and those families
when registered with Defence Primary Healthcare. NHS England is also working hard to accommodate the needs of Service families in the community.
What does that mean? New ways of working for the MoD and the
Most service families, spouses, partners, dependent children and adults are registered with NHS GP practices in the local community. NHS England does not purchase services for these populations
directly this is done by the local clinical commissioning groups (CCGs).
There are however, 20,000 service family members who are registered with the Defence Medical Services (DMS) in England and do use the on-base medical facilities, for example at a training unit. For this group hospital and community care falls to NHS England to purchase.
Working with the Armed Forces population, NHS England have put in place 37 interim commissioning
NHS are now in place and the past year has seen both organisations working through these new arrangements for healthcare. As well as this, NHS England has been working with other partners including service charities and the Department of Health to improve the services available to veterans and raising awareness of veteran’s mental health issues within ex-service communities.
policies which state what procedures they will buy, and in some cases, under what circumstances. These common policies apply across England and aim to remove any disadvantage when posted from one unit to another within England.
For example take IVF. It has been the case that entitlement to IVF cycles of treatment has varied from one location to another. In some it is 0 in others it is 3 cycles. This caused disadvantage to those on a programme who had their treatment interrupted by a posting. Fine if the receiving area gave a more generous number of cycles but devastating if the new location offered less.
To end this potential for disadvantage there is now in place a common criteria and number of cycles for IVF across England. For more details please go to http://www.england.nhs. uk/2013/11/19/comm-pol/. Any discussions about accessing these services should be with your Doctor in the first instance.
As a service family, NHS England values greatly your input and views especially relating to subjects such as access to health services and transition from the Armed Forces, so that NHS England can gain an insight into what is important for those serving and the impact on their families when it comes to healthcare. We are already working with the Families Federations across all services, and will be taking part in further engagement exercises in collaboration with the RAF Families Federation in the coming months.
Further information and detail can be found at
www.choices.nhs.uk where guidance can be found related to the NHS across other parts of the UK.
We would love to hear from you about any issues or problems you have or are experiencing in accessing NHS services. We would also like to know how you would prefer to be asked your views in the future - please email to england.
midlandsarmedforces@nhs.net
www.raf-ff.org.uk
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