David Gillon

Commons Public Affairs Committee on experience of ESA and PIP assessments with Atos, Capita and Maximus. Closes Thursday
 
Possibly of interest to kaberett given last week's incident with Atos. I'm intending to write about my own Kafkaesque experience with Atos, and the results that followed from that, such as panic attacks to the point of being unable to face another assessment and now having severe anxiety issues.

DWP Consultation into PIP and use of Disability Aids. Closes Friday

This one is really disturbing, The language used is clearly calculated to portray use of disability aids as insignificant and undertaken solely in order to qualify for benefits. It's so bad there's a strong case for lodging a complaint about the consultation atPIP.consultationfeedback@DWP.GSI.GOV.UK and at least one complaint has already been lodged with the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee. My really worrry here is that they're doing it to establish a precedent that smaller disability aids disqualify you from benefits that will then be extended to exclude wheelchairs and other mobility aids from counting. (This isn't simply paranoia, this is the government department that introduced the 'imaginary wheelchair' into ESA assessments, allowing the assessor to make judgements on the basis of 'You don't have a wheelchair, but if you did I don't think mobility would be an issue')

Apologies for the short notice, but they both seem to have been deliberately hidden over the  New Year break in the hope people would either not see them, or see them and forget about them. (I missed one and forgot about the other - fortunately other people remembered).

ETA: Removed stray second reference to Kab, no idea how that got there!

 I talked about how my initial ESA WCA turned into a disaster that ultimately destroyed six weeks of my life in my initial blog back in May. 

I've finally been able to face dealing with ATOS again and we had a second try at a WCA on Thursday, this time with them having assured me that there would be an adjustable seat available. Now to give them their due, as soon as I signed in the receptionist produced an adjustable office chair and took it through into the waiting area for me. Unfortunately it didn't make a lot of difference, I couldn't raise it high enough to get a comfortable sitting position (and I'm not exactly tall), and while the back adjusted, the seat, which is the only hope of a comfortable position if I can't get it high enough, didn't. So yet again I ended up sitting turned onto the side of my right hip, with my left leg stuck out straight, in pain and growing rapidly worse.

I'd deliberately arrived with less than five minutes before my appointment to limit the waiting time, 45 minutes later they called me through....

I was seen by a rather elderly doctor who seemed reasonably on top of his brief, but ever so slightly tatty in his appearance, which doesn't impress.

I wasn't impressed by the assessment, either; scripted assessments are all very well if you want a consistent approach, but, because disability is individual rather than consistent, what you're going to end up with is consistently inadequate. The doctor really didn't like the fact that I insisted on qualifying everything I said. Tough, if your questions don't fit my situation I'm going to tell you so.

I made a point of telling him I was unable to get a remotely comfortable position in the chair (which the receptionist had brought through) and I had to repeatedly change position, ultimately reaching the point that I just couldn't bear to sit at all. He had to ask several times if I was able to continue, and we conducted the rest of the assessment with me swapping back and forth between standing with crutches and perched against the edge of the examination bed, I think he may have gotten the message that I really do have quite extreme problems with sitting.

He really seemed quite put out when he asked me to sit on the bed and wanted to do the hammer tap thing on my knees. Get my pain levels high enough and my left leg will spontaneously refuse to bend, which it did. What exactly is the point of complaining to the patient if their disability doesn't allow them to do something? I'm not doing it to spite you, this is the way my disability works.

By the time we finished I was visibly shaking and couldn't put my left foot down at all. It's only a five minute drive from their office to my home, yet I had to seriously consider pulling over on the way home, my pain levels were that high and didn't fade until I'd spent a couple of hours in bed, the first half physically shaking. The pain levels probably mean I wasn't as effective at answering their questions as I could have been, but hopefully the visibility of my reactions will have mostly countered that. Of course, this being ATOS, the end result is anyone's guess, but as far as I'm concerned they managed to make me demonstrate exactly why I meet the ESA criteria, I just wish that they hadn't.

(And just to make a painful experience almost completely pointless, the government announced as part of the spending review that I'll only be entitled to ESA for 12 months, as opposed to indefinitely -- 8 months down...)