Ever since former parachute jumping instructor Victor Last left RAF Brize Norton — and that was way back in 1987 — he has been nurturing a business idea which he says could help people in pain and at the same time save money: to offer military-style rehabilitation to civilians who have suffered injuries.

Speaking from his home at Fordwells, near Burford, he said: “If we damaged ourselves in the RAF, as we often did, we knew that Headley Court would put you back together again — if at all possible. When I left the RAF I found that there was no such place for people suffering injuries in the outside world.”

He added: “I think it is important that such a place should open. It is needed badly to tackle a physical and psychological vicious circle that many people, however strong their will in the first place, enter after sustaining injuries.”

The vicious circle starts with the problem that if the initial, and often very good, NHS trauma treatment has not worked you sit around waiting for treatments with little idea of how to keep up your own morale.

In the pub or club you talk up your injuries to justify to friends why you are not back at work; your kind-hearted GP puts you on highest level of benefits (which you do not want to lose). Then, back to the beginning, and you sit around waiting for treatments.

By contrast, at Headley Court Military Hospital, near Epsom in Surrey, injured members of the armed forces are taught how to manage their condition — and they work hard at rehabilitating themselves from day one.

They live on site and work at it as though it were their job — which, of course in a sense it is, since they are paid employees of the armed forces.

Now Mr Last has set up Spring Rehabilitation Centre in a bid to break that circle, and in March this year the first four patients were welcomed on to a three-week civilian rehabilitation course, using consultants from Headley Court.

The new company, which has five full-time employees and a head office in Little Wittenham, held the pilot course in Haslemere, Surrey using the De Vere Residential Training Centre and “coming to work” every day at treatment rooms in the nearby conference centre.

Two of the four patients had the £9,250 fee paid for by insurance companies following accidents, one was self-funding and one came under a private medical insurance plan.

From a financial point of view, rather than that of someone who simply wants to help others by doing something he believes to be important, Mr Last believes the attitude of insurance companies is important.

He said: “The driver of the scheme at the moment is the insurance sector, though we are hoping in the long-term the NHS will use rehabilitation centres too.

“The point here is that insurance companies can mitigate their loss on an individual, and also find out if an individual really wants to improve and is prepared to work at that objective.

“The companies mitigate their loss because if an individual goes into a downward spiral they could be looking at total pay-outs of between £250,000 and £1m.

“And if the fee sounds high, it would go down if this blueprint were adopted through economies of scale as more people used it.”

He added: “A lot of people after they have been injured, after they have lost jobs, contact with friends and sometimes even family, become increasingly disgruntled and disengaged with life.

“The first three months after injury are critical. Research clearly shows that if patients do not manage to return to work within those first few months after a disabling injury, the likelihood of their ever doing so diminishes rapidly.”

Taking exercise, even playing tennis or badminton with, for instance, an excruciatingly painful back, may sound like a strange thing to do. But that is what happens in the kind of active rehabilitation that Mr Last offers. And it works.

Getting this blueprint off the ground has been a long and bumpy ride for Mr Last.

In the early 1990s he and partners secured bank finance for a £6m centre in Reading — then the property market collapsed and the bank pulled out.

A few years later he started again in what he calls a small way. This time the project operated at the Royal Masonic Hospital in West London for five years, treating 400 patients.

“We had a 90 per cent success rate but then the hospital was sold from under us,” Mr Last said.

Now he has secured finance to grow his mission with a plan to open centres throughout the UK, including Oxfordshire.

Certainly, stories of the success of Headley Court are legion.

One former patient, a former UK soldier who contracted polio after spending days clinging to the bank of a river awaiting rescue, told me that had it not been for the treatment he received there some 50 years ago he would certainly be in a wheelchair now and, psychologically, he would be a wreck. Life would not be worth living.

The company has at last come into being with the help of a group of thinkers and innovators called Acumen 7 led by entrepreneur Clive Arup of Little Wittenham.

Mr Last pitched his idea at one of their meetings and found that some of the people sitting around the table were interested — and willing to put money into the idea.

Mr Last said: “I told them of the lack of any cohesive and co-ordinated approach to rehabilitation in this country, and how it could save money for insurance companies.”

Now some of those men whom he met at that meeting are co-directors, working with Mr Last as much because this is a socially necessary innovation as the desire to see a return on their investment.

n Contact: 01428 788376 Web: www.springrehab.co.uk