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Armed Forces: Mental Health Services

Volume 503: debated on Wednesday 6 January 2010

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence how much his Department spent on mental health care services for armed forces personnel in (a) Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey constituency, (b) the Highlands and (c) Scotland in each year since 2001. (304649)

The MOD has 15 Departments of Community Mental Health (DCMHs) in the UK (with additional centres in Germany, Cyprus and Gibraltar), which have since 2004 provided out-patient mental healthcare for members of the armed forces. Three of these are in Scotland: at RAF Leuchars, RAF Kinloss and HM Naval Base Faslane. Armed forces personnel based in the Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey constituency who require mental health services will generally be referred to the DCMH at RAF Kinloss, which is a few miles to the east of Inverness in the adjacent constituency of Moray.

Responsibility for individual management of the DCMHs is shared between the single service commands, and it is not possible to separate out costs from overall unit medical budgets. Each service funds its respective DCMHs differently, with funding provision coming from a number of areas. Due to the number of budgets to which costs would be attributable, any detailed study of DCMH finances would incur disproportionate costs.