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lies or mistakes thru lack of training or could not care as long as they get paid on result

[Deleted User]
[Deleted User] Posts: 90 Listener
edited August 2018 in PIP, DLA, and AA
now we have assessments for benifits and are told to supply medical evidence?which we do? we then have a hcp check us over by asking us a few questions and do a medical although it is claimed not medical such as touch your toes put arms above head bend your nexck left to right  pic up a bit of paper  not a medical mind  exsplain how you are day to day  then it is over ?? you did exsplain how you are day to day as you know how you are ?now you sit and wait  in time you get your report if you asked for it but find no mention of evidence and misleading information such as you can walk with ease 500yards can mix with people can cook can count cash or use a phone??the report is fiction it is not what you or evidence stated  do you say the assessment was a lie or a mistake  BUT the decision maker goes on the hcp report and seldom ignors it so you are refused WHY because the hcp lied or ignored facts they can see it is not rocket science is it ??now you must prove the report was wrong  who cares hcp no decision maker no ??so you are aNGRY AND STATE ASSESSER LIED NO SHE WAS MISTAKEN AS NOT accountable to anyone not even the company who employs them unless mass complaints  WHAT CAN YOU DO???????????????
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Comments

  • poppy123456
    poppy123456 Community member Posts: 53,368 Disability Gamechanger
    Regardless of whether you say the assessment was a "lie" or a mistake as you say, the DWP and the Tribunal will not be interested in any untruths told during any assessment. All they will be interested in is how your conditions affect you and you proving that they do. People get angry yes but getting angry when writing the MR letter or getting angry at a Tribunal will NOT help your claim.
    I would appreciate it if members wouldn't tag me please. I have all notifcations turned off and wouldn't want a member thinking i'm being rude by not replying.
    If i see a question that i know the answer to i will try my best to help.
  • wilko
    wilko Community member Posts: 2,458 Disability Gamechanger
    Sending in all the medical evidence sounds good but the PIP acessment is not to comfirm your diagnosis,but to establish how your illness condition affects your day to day living activities and your ability to remain mobile. The acessor has to be sure you can or can't preform the descriptors set out in the PIP acessment and award points according to your abilities demostrated at your acessment.
  • Yadnad
    Yadnad Posts: 2,856 Disability Gamechanger
    sweet said:
    now we have assessments for benifits and are told to supply medical evidence?which we do? we then have a hcp check us over by asking us a few questions and do a medical although it is claimed not medical such as touch your toes put arms above head bend your nexck left to right  pic up a bit of paper  not a medical mind  exsplain how you are day to day  then it is over ?? you did exsplain how you are day to day as you know how you are ?now you sit and wait  in time you get your report if you asked for it but find no mention of evidence and misleading information such as you can walk with ease 500yards can mix with people can cook can count cash or use a phone??the report is fiction it is not what you or evidence stated  do you say the assessment was a lie or a mistake  BUT the decision maker goes on the hcp report and seldom ignors it so you are refused WHY because the hcp lied or ignored facts they can see it is not rocket science is it ??now you must prove the report was wrong  who cares hcp no decision maker no ??so you are aNGRY AND STATE ASSESSER LIED NO SHE WAS MISTAKEN AS NOT accountable to anyone not even the company who employs them unless mass complaints  WHAT CAN YOU DO???????????????
    And don't forget that in the space of a few minutes they can assess your mental health. Shame that the NHS can't work to that speed, it would increase through put of patients thus increasing the number of patients that can be seen in one 12 hour shift.
  • [Deleted User]
    [Deleted User] Posts: 90 Listener
    edited August 2018
    Yadnad said:
    sweet said:
    now we have assessments for benifits and are told to supply medical evidence?which we do? we then have a hcp check us over by asking us a few questions and do a medical although it is claimed not medical such as touch your toes put arms above head bend your nexck left to right  pic up a bit of paper  not a medical mind  exsplain how you are day to day  then it is over ?? you did exsplain how you are day to day as you know how you are ?now you sit and wait  in time you get your report if you asked for it but find no mention of evidence and misleading information such as you can walk with ease 500yards can mix with people can cook can count cash or use a phone??the report is fiction it is not what you or evidence stated  do you say the assessment was a lie or a mistake  BUT the decision maker goes on the hcp report and seldom ignors it so you are refused WHY because the hcp lied or ignored facts they can see it is not rocket science is it ??now you must prove the report was wrong  who cares hcp no decision maker no ??so you are aNGRY AND STATE ASSESSER LIED NO SHE WAS MISTAKEN AS NOT accountable to anyone not even the company who employs them unless mass complaints  WHAT CAN YOU DO???????????????
    And don't forget that in the space of a few minutes they can assess your mental health. Shame that the NHS can't work to that speed, it would increase through put of patients thus increasing the number of patients that can be seen in one 12 hour shift.
    we know that that is impossible and hcp are not able to decide if you have mental problems unless you demonstrate it on the day of medical i wont say assessment as i think it is medical  but it is fantastic they can cure you of an illness you may have or never recover from medical in you are asked to perform tasks and some do eyesight test breathing test since stopped i hear due to health safty issue breath that is plus balance test although they cannot note if you can climb stairs
  • poppy123456
    poppy123456 Community member Posts: 53,368 Disability Gamechanger
    The assessment is not a medical, it's an assessment and nothing more.
    I would appreciate it if members wouldn't tag me please. I have all notifcations turned off and wouldn't want a member thinking i'm being rude by not replying.
    If i see a question that i know the answer to i will try my best to help.
  • [Deleted User]
    [Deleted User] Posts: 90 Listener
    There are a number of incorrect statements/assumptions in the original post. 

    Claimants are not told to supply medical evidence at all. Claimants are asked to supply supporting evidence. It can be whatever you want it to be. It does not have to be medical at all and it’s often better if it’s not given that diagnosis, prognosis and symptoms are rarely in dispute. 

    The face to face is not a medical because the person doing it is not medically qualified and it is only functional testing and observation. A medical usually involves taking clinical readings and is done by a medically qualified person. Also not all face to face consultations involve functional testing.

    A decision maker cannot ignore evidence. They have to weigh all evidence. There is undoubtedly a cultural issue within DWP as preference is clearly given to the contents of HCP reports even when the contents are patently ludicrous bit it’s worth noting that it’s a system that does work fine for the majority of claimants. The numbers for whom it doesn’t work are significant and far too high but it does work for the majority. 

    I agree with the OP that the instinct to conclude that a HCP has lied is understandable but the other side of that coin is that PIP is not that hard to understand and yet most people claiming it, especially DLA conversions, don’t take the time to get to grips with the basics, and thus present their case badly in the first place. 

    I wrote the following on a thread yesterday and I stand by it.

    HCPs basically have their own professional qualification and then 5 to 7 days training as a HCP which is largely generic disability awareness and learning enough about the HCP process. After that it’s all speculation as to what happens but I suspect we know enough to be able to say that some strive to do an excellent job and some are influenced by others to find shortcuts to survival. Few do the job full time as they are in quasi-medical professions where full time work is hard to come by. Many are therefore either very young and lacking life experience or struggling to get by just as much as claimants. Unless the younger ones have ill family or friends their actual life experience may not have involved impairment at all. It amuses me and makes me sad that the very empathy claimants with disabilities would want for themselves is something they rarely extend to HCPs. It is of course entirely understandable that that’s the case but it doesn’t make it right. Walking a mile in anyone else’s shoes is always an eye opener. HCPs have a difficult job made harder by poor training which inevitably means poor practice and subjectivity come into play.

    Forum posters love to think they’re in the majority but that’s most unlikely as we know that forums are generally full of negative stuff whether it’s like here, football, money or whatever. No-one will find a forum full of positivity on any subject. If you want that you need a blog. That’s why I despair a little when people call HCPs “liars” without a thought for the other side of the story. Careless, pressured, badly expressed and factually incorrect yes of course but out and out provable lies are rare and in any case impossible to prove without a transcription. I have also observed many times that proving someone else wrong does not make you right and doesn’t make a case for qualifying for benefit. 

    The single strongest things you can do to sway a decision maker is to have strong anecdotal evidence of the consequences of your attempts to perform the activities in question and have absolute consistency between your claim pack and what you say at a HCP assessment. It’s interesting how many people think their claim pack was perfect when there are often huge gaps and obvious inconsistencies. There are many things which contribute to negative outcomes and the HCP is often a far smaller part of that than claimants think. They just happen to be the most visible.

    In terms of accountability then yes one of the flaws of the process is that the accountability of private companies is inevitably poor but a well done complaint can be very effective and reverse a HCP recommendation to a DM. However, in order to do that the complainant has to focus on arguments they can win. As above, there’s no argument to win on lies unless you have a transcription. There are arguments to win if you know whether they breached their own guidance and when there is clear factual evidence which shows they must be wrong. For example a wholly blind claimant for whom a HCP gave a Snellen reading was one I came across recently. 

    The short answer is that you do an MR if needed and lodge a complaint if it can be evidenced but you stick to demonstrable facts not emotive unprovable assertions.

    i shall correct the first part ?we are asked to supply supporting evidence??now that brings into question why.when an hcp can look at you and state nope that is wrong i will use a freinds claim ?following a crash they suffered soinal damage on acesssmant home one ?they could not or ever do as asked without help yet could stand bend and stand on one leg indeed they could walk fifty yards without difficulty ???REFUSED  mr done refused  mp docter and consultant got involved another mr  given high both  report from hcp used in original decision hcp still assessing others????
  • [Deleted User]
    [Deleted User] Posts: 90 Listener
    edited August 2018
    The assessment is not a medical, it's an assessment and nothing more.
    if not a medical why tests ?why eyesight test? why balance test? indeed why any type of physical activity at all you can decline i did and was instructed the acessesment would be refered back to dwp  but as i pointed out i had medical thank you ?i did in the end complete balance holding radiator did one arm lift did pic up bit paper so test was done

  • poppy123456
    poppy123456 Community member Posts: 53,368 Disability Gamechanger
    What mikehughes stated is correct. The face to face is not a medical because the person doing it is not medically qualified and it is only functional testing and observation. A medical usually involves taking clinical readings and is done by a medically qualified person. Also not all face to face consultations involve functional testing.

    I claim PIP for a physical disability and during my assessment for my review i wasn't asked to do anything...this is because it's not a medical.

    I would appreciate it if members wouldn't tag me please. I have all notifcations turned off and wouldn't want a member thinking i'm being rude by not replying.
    If i see a question that i know the answer to i will try my best to help.
  • Yadnad
    Yadnad Posts: 2,856 Disability Gamechanger
    edited August 2018
    sweet said:







    we know that that is impossible and hcp are not able to decide if you have mental problems unless you demonstrate it on the day of medical 

    I agree that we all know that it is impossible. It took months of work with a psychiatrist and a psychologist to determine the depth and type of mental disorder that I had. On top of that I was constantly assessed, sometimes under section to ensure that the treatment I was receiving was in fact working. This has been ongoing since 1995.

    For the mental health issue in a PIP assessment, the assessor has a huge number of cut and paste comments that they use (14 in total in my assessment report) not to show that there was no impact but to go one step further and try to show that a mental illness was not in existence. 
    In other words they went beyond the terms of the assessment to actually show that the diagnosis was wrong never mind the impact.

    It should not matter how one acts or projects themselves in an assessment setting. In fact it is common that those who do have a mental illness can and do hide it so well that no one can guess it exists. I am one of those - you would never guess that there is anything wrong with me. If evidence is produced that states that such an illness exists that should be good enough for the assessor. They are there to assess the impact not the diagnosis.
  • Yadnad
    Yadnad Posts: 2,856 Disability Gamechanger

    poppy123456 said:
    What mikehughes stated is correct. The face to face is not a medical because the person doing it is not medically qualified and it is only functional testing and observation. A medical usually involves taking clinical readings and is done by a medically qualified person. Also not all face to face consultations involve functional testing.

    I claim PIP for a physical disability and during my assessment for my review i wasn't asked to do anything...this is because it's not a medical.



    I agree with you Poppy, it is not a medical. 

    I claimed for the impact of having a damaged lower spine, upper spine, and mental illness amongst other things such as debilitating Chronic Pancreatitis, lack of control of type 1 diabetes (due to mental health).

    In all of my three assessments I was told to put hands, arms up, side to side, touch my knees bend forward as well as stand on one foot, not forgetting the usual finger thumb grip.

    I tried to carry out all of the instructed movements as you would if it were a doctor/consultant asking you. Of course I was in pain but managed to carry out all of the 'tests'.

    For the memory/mental health test (Mental Status Examination) I was assessed as able to fulfil all of the requirements, I didn't rock in the chair, I didn't avoid looking at the assessor, I had good insight as to my health conditions, I did not sweat etc I can't now remember all of them but there were 14 reasons given why my mental health is excellent.

    So was mine a medical or just a functional assessment?
  • [Deleted User]
    [Deleted User] Posts: 90 Listener
    edited August 2018
    okay so thats that then?  post answered sorted over with it is dm not hcp who decides  although i feel that is way way wrong or dm would not follow hcp paperwork but  for an hcp to state a person can walk or carry out tests when medical evidence and eyes say other wise is no mistake or misinformation it is an outright lie and for dm to agree is wrong as remmber dm looks at medical info supplied???not in my view 
  • [Deleted User]
    [Deleted User] Posts: 90 Listener
    Er, it IS the DM who decides. A HCP can only make a recommendation.
    which the dm useualy follows after all the dm is not qualified in any area of health they are office workers and i add will openly inform you if you ask 

  • Yadnad
    Yadnad Posts: 2,856 Disability Gamechanger
    None of those things were anything other than a functional assessment. A Physio or OT could ask you to do the same.
    Thanks Mike OK if they were all part of the functional assessment, how then is it possible that an OT from Social Services visited my home a year or two ago and assessed me as needing the following equipment.

    An electric bath seat so as to enable me to get into and out of the bath. She also noted that I had to have help to stand up from the chair, have someone wash and dry my lower legs as I could not bend that far as well as wash and dry my back due to an ability to do it myself.

    A bed riser enables me to get in and out of the bed as well as using it to hold onto whilst partly dressing myself. I needed help to put underclothes on, trousers, socks, shoes, shirts etc 

    Two raised toilet seats and framework to hold onto whilst getting off the toilet.

    I won't start on the mental health part as I have had functional assessments coming out of my ears from mental health workers and OT's. Their reports state that I need help with many things and that my short term memory is shot (currently being assessed for early onset dementia) My wife has to come to all appointments be they for the lack of ability to sleep or mental health problems such as sudden bouts of previously unknown acts of violence falling then into deep depression. Or the problems arising out of the lack of control of type 1 diabetes.  All of the people that treat me are aware that to get to the truth they have to ask her. 

    One thing that I am well able to portray is the person that people expect to see and not the person that I really am. Apparently this is common amongst patients of previous high ability.

  • Yadnad
    Yadnad Posts: 2,856 Disability Gamechanger
    I suspect part of the answer lies in the fact the OT assessment was a couple of years ago. 
    It was. Nothing has changed but yes I am aware that I would need to prove that or arrange for SS assessments every 12 months simply for the benefit of the DWP.
  • feir
    feir Community member Posts: 397 Pioneering
    I've sent all my medical stuff in (some of which contradicts my last assessment, which i got 0 points on). Was texted on thrusday saying assessors are in my area that week and i could make an appointment with them? Why?

    I sent my form in and filled that then sent in my medical stuff to back it up.Don't get why i need another assessment for? Especially when the last person got stuff wrong.


    Btw i need tips on how to 'look' depressed coz they think i am not. Not serious about this btw but how do i get past their ignorance? Not sure how to educate my assessor when they arrive.
  • feir
    feir Community member Posts: 397 Pioneering
    I had a 10 week therapy course to help me mentally and it was only by the last week that i felt like i trusted this person enough to open up and then my support was gone anyway. I really struggle with this stuff. I'll try though, it'll probably trigger off my anxiety and i break down in front of them anyway. Might ask someone to come to mine and do the talking for me as well.
  • debbiedo49
    debbiedo49 Community member Posts: 2,904 Disability Gamechanger
  • feir
    feir Community member Posts: 397 Pioneering
    Maybe @Username_removed i feel sick/panicking just thinking about it. I'll try but think this will be my last time and then after that i just hope my operations work and i never become this vulnerable again.

    Thanks @debbiedo49 i need it. :smile:
  • Yadnad
    Yadnad Posts: 2,856 Disability Gamechanger
    The intent of PIP was for almost everyone to get a HCP assessment and for that to be repeated on review/renewal so... that’s why.

    In terms of depression you stand your ground and insist they listen to you explain it in detail and especially the bit about his you look not being who you are. There are several threads on here talking about how you look as though it has some influence. If a HCP is going to err and take a snapshot they’re going to do that regardless of what you look like and the only person who can stop them in their tracks is you, by talking.
    All well and good Mike, but my experiences tell me that that is like trying to cut a stone with a butter knife. Never had an assessor that wants to listen. They prefer to control the assessment and wanting you to agree to their statements/opinions.
    Trying to get a word in afterwards only finds you missing the next question. 
  • Yadnad
    Yadnad Posts: 2,856 Disability Gamechanger
    No one can do the taking for you albeit that you can take someone with you. Sad to say it may be best to let them see you triggered. A sad indictment of the process.
    Seriously? For some the trigger will result in tears for others like me it could turn the other way with the assessor running for the hills.
    That is a very dangerous practice - to push someone to that point as they would not know what the reaction would be.

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