‘Shell-shock’ charity has £3.2m cut by the NHS

BRITAIN’S biggest veterans’ mental health charity is facing a cash crisis after NHS chiefs withdrew £3.2million of funding for ex-squaddies with severe PostTraumatic Stress Disorder.

Combat Stress will have to reduce vital residential care programmes for hundreds of traumatised troops – which have been proven to tackle symptoms of mental illness – unless it can make up the shortfall from public donations.

The NHS’s funding accounts for 20 per cent of Combat Stress’s budget. Last night, chief executive Sue Freeth described the situation as an ‘SOS moment’ for the charity.

Hours after The Mail on Sunday contacted NHS England over its decision to withdraw support for Combat Stress, it announced a new mental health initiative for veterans costing exactly the same amount as it has pulled from the charity. But while Combat Stress offers residential care to former troops, they will now be treated as outpatients. Ms Freeth insisted this service would not help the country’s most vulnerable veterans.

She said: ‘Patients with complex cases of PTSD need to be in a caring environment and to be surrounded by people similar to themselves. Yet now NHS England is going to treat them as outpatients. We will continue to offer residential care for as long as we can. But we can no longer use our reserve funds to subsidise the service. We will struggle. This is an SOS moment.’ Combat Stress was forced to make 40 staff redundant just before Christmas as part of a £2.5 million cost-cutting programme. The charity employs 260 people, mostly clinicians and psychiatrists, at three centres around the UK.

It provides mental healthcare for up to 3,000 veterans a year, including 324 who took part in the charity’s six-week residential treatment programmes in 2016-17.

Dr Jonathan Leach, from NHS England, said: ‘We are investing £3.2 million in a national complex treatment service, launching next month, which will treat more patients over a longer period.’