Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 01 March 2022
My friend raises an extremely important point about data interdependencies. That metadata will be critical to building a network of understanding about dependants of veterans and some of the wider implications of that—they are often people who have lived in service accommodation.
I am concerned about the report in that sense, although it seeks to address the perceived gaps in the system. When veterans and their families fall between the cracks, that has real-life consequences. Just this week, I was contacted by the daughter of Donnie Watt, an 85-year-old veteran from Glenrothes in Fife. Donnie was an intelligence officer for the Royal Air Force in Berlin during the cold war and was diagnosed with dementia in 2017. Since then, he has been confined to hospital wards in Fife and, in the past five years, has spent just five months at home with his family. Donnie’s daughter Jane feels that veterans’ complex medical needs, as in Donnie’s case, are being overlooked in a stretched national health service.
The health and social care partnership that is responsible says that Donnie’s case is complex and that veteran-specific needs are difficult. I do not think that that is good enough. That does not mean that Donnie and other veterans like him are not worthy of the bespoke time and care needed to make them comfortable. The problem is that we do not know how many people like Donnie are out there. Until we collate and analyse all the data that is available to us, we will never know, and veterans such as Donnie will continue to suffer diminished quality of life.