Senior Royal Navy officer calls for review of 'outdated' medical standards to help recruitment
A senior Royal Navy officer is calling on the service to review its medical standards for people wanting to join.
Rear Admiral Jude Terry, the Royal Navy's Director of People and Training, said medical provision and technology has advanced, whilst the service's standards have not changed for more than 20 years.
RAdm Terry was commenting on social media in response to an article which references findings from a Freedom of Information (FOI) request that Royal Navy recruitment has dropped to its lowest number since 2017.
This includes those who enter the non-commissioned basic training and the request revealed that from April 2022 to April 2023, 2,453 people were recruited to the Royal Navy.
This represents a drop of more than 800 from the previous year – and the lowest it has been since 2017.
The Navy has been grappling with a shrinking workforce for a number of years and has identified recruitment and retention as an issue it needs to address.
Defence publication Thin Pinstriped Line says the service is facing an "exceptionally serious personnel crisis" and that the "area of perhaps most concern" is the medical process.
It argues, in an article, that "the issue is that with a very risk averse standard to entry and a population far more open to talking about health and with a greater understanding of their health, food tolerances and lifestyles, it can be easy to be told you are unfit to join."
The article claims: "If you suffer from severe headaches, regular nosebleeds, are lactose intolerant or have 'cold injury' you are ruled permanently unfit to join."
RAdm Terry wrote on social media platform X, formerly Twitter: "When I joined, ACL surgery was quite difficult and not always successful. Today that is not the case and people with ACL reconstruction play high-level sport.
"We should reconsider the ban on this (there are others). Everyone still needs to be fit for Ph1 Trg [training]."
Referring to "outdated standards", she suggests reviewing documents in house and added: "A blue inhaler given to you at three and never used shouldn't stop you joining. This is about improving the process and engagement with those who want to join."
The Royal Navy officer was also keen to stress that it is about getting those who wish to join the Senior Service more effectively and not about lowering standards.
RAdm Terry also said there are numerous factors to consider in improving recruitment, and outlined how the Navy is working to improve numbers: "We have been driving change in this area for well over a year.
"We have reviewed the Defence Aptitude Assessment, increased our marketing budget, reopened careers offices, put more people into the recruiting and attraction team (people recruit people, tech enables that), worked with our contractor team to bring the processes we can in house, bolstered our 3 Candidate Preparation Centres and opened a new one @HMSCambria."
The Royal Navy said they have already introduced strategies to improve their recruitment process and are working on ways to develop a candidate satisfaction survey.
The service also said the recommendations in the Haythornthwaite Review, an independent review of UK service personnel's terms and conditions, and the commitments made in the Defence Command Paper 23 would keep the military as an attractive employer.
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