RMA – The Royal Marines Charity has completed the first phase of its three-year ‘Building Collaboration and Consensus’ project that aims to develop and implement a Common Assessment Framework, preventing beneficiaries having to repeat and re-explain their challenges and issues time and time again through multiple agencies before receiving any required much-needed support.

“It’s never far from my thoughts – what if I hadn’t put my hands up or had that wobble? Made that cry for help? Where would I be now? I wouldn’t like to answer that question.”

Steve Richards was a Royal Marine for 36 years, going from being a Junior Marine  to leaving as a Lieutenant Colonel with four operational commendations. He had a varied career that included serving in Northern Ireland, the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan.

His health collapsed in 2010 following cerebral malaria and swine flu contracted after a deployment to West Africa and he was eventually medically discharged four years’ later due to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and associated auto-immune disorders.

In 2010, safely back in Camp Bastion and two days before he was due to return home to his family in the UK, Corporal Phil Eaglesham RM phoned his wife Julie to say he’d be back home with her and his three young sons in just a few days.

The very next day he became ill with flu-like symptoms, and was eventually diagnosed with Q Fever. This is a relatively rare degenerative disease with acute and chronic stages. The prognosis was dire and Phil remembers: “It wasn’t good. I wasn’t expected to survive.”