This article has been published and circulated amongst our fellow hospital workers in Vital Signs no.6 – feel free to donate for printing costs.

In October 2025, top managers at Southmead hospital sent out an email to all staff saying that they had a great time during a visit of Army Reservists, which “brought great energy and enthusiasm”. The visit was about providing insights for the army about how a civilian hospital works. Management also allowed the army to put up a recruitment stall in the atrium. 

The collaboration between North Bristol NHS Trust (NBT) and the army goes further. There are regular ‘joint mentoring programs’, organised by NBT, the Ministry of Defence and DE&S (Defence, Equipment and Support). Over eight months civilian and army medical staff share ‘transferable skills’, so far over 140 people took part in these programs. “The DE&S and the NHS are unique organisations that exist in complex worlds,” says Tim Whittlestone, Deputy Medical Director at North Bristol NHS Trust. “Let’s share our experience to create resilient and powerful managers.”

What’s the problem with this collaboration?

These announcements speak about ‘skill sharing between communities’, which sounds all lovey-dovey, but what kind of ‘community’ is the army? We live in a social system where regular economic crises constrict markets and increase the competition between nation states. We first see ‘trade wars’, such as the putting up tariffs, often followed by real wars. In the last century this led to two global massacres, killing 70 to 80 million people. We are currently heading towards a situation of global war, again. 

Politicians find all kinds of explanations (“We want to defend democracy and western values”), but when it comes down to it, it is about sphere of influences, access to resources and future profits. At least Trump is honest when he grabbed the oil in Venezuela or wants to annex Greenland. The UK army was part of a military mission in Iraq in 1991 and 2003 that was based on the lie of “getting rid of weapons of mass destruction.” This military mission and its consequences ended up killing tens of thousands of civilians. 

We currently see a global arms race, led by the US, which will spend over a trillion US-Dollar on military defence in 2026. It is clear that they pay for this by cutting our income and welfare, such as health and education. The current war in Iran and the Middle East will hike our costs of living. The governments have nothing positive to offer us anymore, so they use external enemies to maintain their power, whether in Russia or Ukraine, whether in China or the US. They want to normalise this process of militarisation by encouraging more exchange between the army and ‘the people’.

The role of the health sector in wars

The health sector plays a particular role in modern mass wars. During the current war in Ukraine, both armies face a lack of man-power, of soldiers. They offer higher wages for poor folks to join the forces or use brute force to conscript young men. Still, all these measures would not be sufficient to staff the frontlines. They need a vast medical infrastructure to patch up injured soldiers. The priority is not to help those who have the worst injuries, but those who can possibly be returned to the front line – which they call “reverse triage”. At the same time they close thousands of hospital beds and services for civilian patients, at a time when the war creates fertile conditions for new pandemics. 

We won’t collaborate in this drive towards death and destruction, propelled by a system of power and exploitation that is in a deep crisis. When we asked our trade union branch office bearers to officially oppose management’s pro-army activities they didn’t want to do that. We call our working class brothers and sisters in the army to refuse being instrumentalised and maimed for the interests of the rich and powerful. We refuse to normalise ‘the army’ in our daily lives, be it in schools, where they pry on working class kids, or in our hospitals, where the re-armament sucks resources away from patients.

No penny, no paramedic for the bosses’ wars! No army collaboration at NBT!