Absolutely. You'll be familiar with the way in which health care is provided here in the UK, which is obviously free at points of need. One of the things we identified some years ago—four or five years ago when I came into this work—was the difficulty of those who had been seriously injured being discharged from the armed forces and then facing what's been described as a cliff edge in relation to care. That level of care would dip until such time as the NHS and other services of course help with the needs of that individual.
We approach this challenge through welcoming the Ministry of Defence to create a seriously injured leaders protocol. So this puts an onus on the Ministry of Defence working within their own system—their own clinicians, welfare staff, social care staff, etc.—to engage at a much earlier time with the NHS. Rather than leaving it to almost the very end of that person's time within the armed forces, we would expect them to be in contact up to six months in advance of departure, making contact with the statutory services in the area where this person will live, ensuring that the clinical handover is fully understood and any challenges that go with that particular individual—health care challenges with that individual—are seen in advance so that they can be addressed before departure, along with the welfare and living requirements of that individual. They may need adaptations to their home, for example, depending on their injuries.
So we aim for that to be as seamless as possible. The measure of success of that is hard to gauge. With some of these things, you gauge it on the basis of not receiving complaints, difficulties, or issues being raised by individuals. We receive some—and we're talking single figures where there have been difficulties—but the protocol has been designed in such a way that where these do arise, there are contact mechanisms in place to ensure that those are dealt with as soon as possible.