And locally during the Covid-19 crisis

One thing Rod Eldridge learned from nearly three decades in the Army was mental resilience. This made him well suited to lead the wellbeing support for nurses at London’s NHS Nightingale Hospital.

After tours of Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan, Rod, from south Wales, had retired, but was still active with military charities.

“Once you’ve served, you want to continue to serve when the nation’s in crisis,” he says. “You know that you have some abilities that may help.”

So when the call went out to set up a team to help the nurses and healthcare professionals at the Nightingale, Rod responded.

“What you’ll find about the military is that we’re very ‘can-do’; we trust each other very quickly, we understand what the mission is, and here our main effort is to support the staff of Nightingale, including the management,” he says. “One of the biggest protective factors we have in the military is the bonds we forge. When you have a team that knows itself, you can hit the ground running.”

Rod put together a team full of ex-Army and Navy nurses who offered crucial support to staff, and were always ready to talk to them as soon as they’d finished a gruelling ITU shift. “It was humbling, and a total delight, to support the healthcare professionals involved in that,” he says.

Rod is not surprised that so many veterans stepped up to help during the crisis.

“There’s a bit of a combat indicator, where suddenly you’ve got a lot of military gravitating towards a crisis. There’s something innate in us about wanting to keep on serving,” he says.

“When you change a large entertainment facility into a hospital in a matter of weeks, that is an amazing feat by all involved. The professional mix of people on the wards was amazing. People were stretched, it was difficult, but I felt that so many grew from the experience.”