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Any Service person injured or unwell while on duty overseas and requires secondary healthcare will be brought back to the RCDM in Birmingham. It is a tri-service unit of over 400 Doctors, Nurses, Healthcare Assistants, Operating Department Practitioners, Radiographers, Biomedical Scientists, Physiotherapists, and Pharmacists. These healthcare professionals are spread across five disparate sites, fully integrated within the NHS, with the vast majority located in Birmingham at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEHB).
Alongside managing the Receiving Arrangements for Military Patients, RCDM’s secondary mission is to force prepare and generate healthcare professionals for operations and exercises. To ensure clinicians remain clinically current and deployable, they regularly undertake more than 30 hours per week in the clinical environment. Many of the personnel are frequently trawled as Individual Augmentees, due to their clinical commitments and the short notice of many deployments, regular attendance of Service Personnel (SP) at structured PT sessions is considerably harder to achieve.
Insufficient infrastructure is a significant challenge to PD delivery at RCDM. The current fitness suite is unsuitable for group training due to its size. Unfortunately, due
Repton Remembrance Parade
had boxing and football teams utilise the facilities, which I will be pushing for next season with the Army Football Master’s male Football team utilising these great facilities.
DSU has also had the pleasure of hosting UK Midlands sports events this year, with the BAWF series and Cross Country hosted by the Physical Training Department. Both events were a smashing success and again bought to light what DSU offers.
In summary, DSU is a highly complex Unit. However, when the opportunity arises, the Unit showcases its ability to deliver, and the resources available should be utilised more by all in the AO and wider field Army. DSU requires an RAPTCI to be adaptable and dynamic. an assignment to DSU provides the RAPTCI with the opportunity to get a solid work-life balance as well as promote a positive culture of Sport and courses for the AO.
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in doubt. Fortunately, the Unit PDA was on the horizon, and this was something both I, the Unit, and the audit team agreed was needed. This was then pushed to WO1 SMI Harden at HQ Regional Command, who visited DSU and agreed to secure funding for the Gym uplift, with in-year underspend. The work has now been completed and the facility is a great place for all to train.
Sport is the primary reason I chose to transfer into the RAPTC, and it’s the backbone of everything I do, whether in work time or socially. We push daily to utilise the facilities here at DSU to promote Sport and have teams using the facility. Prior to my arrival, no teams were using this great location, and on investigation, this was due to a lack of SP knowing what we provide and what DSU has to offer. This was something the DSU HQ lead, Ms Cheryl Rowley, was tasked with changing, and she got to work on producing a Unit Sports brochure to promote the camp and its facilities, and it worked-; we have had Army Women’s and Men’s rugby training camps as well as Royal Artillery rugby men’s team. In addition, the Unit has
DSU Gym Hall Uplift
ROYAL CENTRE FOR DEFENCE MEDICINE (RCDM)
Sgt (SI) K Hanes RAPTC