esa failed medical but cannot sign on. panicking

tazwhoever wrote: »

I'm confused because shouldn't the WCA be done correctly and no missing anything out? Then when it goes to tribunal it gets overturned. Seems like WCA assessors​ aren't following the policy/law?

I can probably answer your question. The WCA should be done correctly. The criteria assessed.. the descriptors... are in themselves probably not that wide of sense but assessing their applicability has been a tragic problem. The private contractors.. initially the much maligned ATOS Healthcare.. simply cut corners and seemed to have institutional failures as widely exposed by former employees, claimants, undercover work and inquiry. The HCPs doing the assessments are it seems not always cream of the crop in their respective professions either and probably among those most likely to flout professional standards or patient care... I don't say that lightly.. I've heard it described by medical professionals such as nurses as the 'pits of the profession to do disability assessments'. In terms of short cutting there is for example often a failure to read the evidence in advance (a breach of laid down protocol) and the focus of the assessments seems to be on speed and efficiency over accuracy or truth. Common complaints (some repeated above) seem logical in that context.

There are more general problems that some claimants by their very nature will struggle to accurately communicate their problems relevant to the WCA and that these assessments are often 'fish out of water' events in that they're very unusual circumstances presented compared to the typical day of the claimant. As example.. many years ago in my WCA assessment I was described as having poor rapport and eye contact.. this runs counter to my normal interactions with people of short durations I'm exposed to... in contrast I should present as upbeat, engaging, humorous and sociable (all of the things which create the deception of someone genuine engaged and healthy)... and my eye contact should be good.... however if presented with a deceitful and manipulative aggressive personality with a name and profession different than a FOI request revealed would examine me and this person rarely looks up from a computer monitor then yes I will show poor rapport and poor eye contact... so the observations were probably correct but the inferences could be wildly wrong.

The understanding of the law as such is probably poor as a result of training and institutional biases... and the same seems true of the DWP Decision Makers who seem to typically just go along with the assessment report and sometimes it seems even repeat standard legally flawed carp... I'm using reference to some degree to the same problems arising in PIP assessments which seem to mirror very well problems with the WCA and for entirely unsurprising reasons. In the end it seems appeal tribunals may be the most open possibility to establishing truth and accurate assessment.

I note the tribunal judge here was quite contemptuous in reference to the assessment report as has been reported by others including one judge describing it as "trash". (It's worth reminding ourselves we are talking about professionals who normally will probably be very diplomatic and inoffensive in their language..so when they criticise evidence in this way they probably do so with some exasperation). I think claimants would generally accept that in stranger stranger short duration assessments there will be some inaccuracy.. but I think all should expect that any should come about for honest reason. When someone manages to trigger no scoring/qualifying descriptors in an assessment or in 2 DWP DM decisions and then goes on to qualify for ESA via tribunal then you can only assume something has gone badly wrong - if that was rare it might be tolerable but it clearly is not rare, has not been rare since ESA was launched, and here is another case... the difference between zero points and 23 is a lot of error of judgement somewhere and I'd take a solid punt I know at which end most, if not all, occurred.

I've only just read the above thread today btw.. so well done Op... sounds like you've been through the mill... hopefully the backdated payments will soon be made and provide a moment of accomplishment!