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CAPITA - PIP INVESTIGATION: Assessment reports show widespread dishonesty by nurses Healthcare pr

charles shepherd

Senior Member
Messages
2,239
CAPITA - PIP INVESTIGATION: Assessment reports show widespread dishonesty by nurses

Healthcare professionals who carry out face-to-face assessments of benefit claimants have lied, ignored written evidence and dishonestly reported the results of physical examinations, according to a two-month Disability News Service (DNS) investigation.

The investigation has compiled evidence from more than 20 disabled people who have contacted DNS over the last year or have commented on previous DNS news stories to claim that their assessors – usually qualified nurses – lied repeatedly in reports they produced for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).

Full story here:

http://www.disabilitynewsservice.co...reports-show-widespread-dishonesty-by-nurses/

MEA report on October 2016 House of Lords meeting with the Chief Medical Officer at CAPITA:

http://www.meassociation.org.uk/201...use-of-lords-next-tuesday-21-october-2016/MEA

Dr Charles Shepherd
Hon Medical Adviser, MEA
 
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2,125
"Another PIP claimant, Mary*, who had a home assessment carried out by Atos, said her assessor “lied about almost everything” in her report.

The nurse claimed that Mary had had no contact with the specialist NHS service she receives treatment from for three years, whereas she had had at least 16 contacts with that service during that time, as a result of severe and debilitating ME.

When she tried to explain this, the nurse “dismissed anything I tried to say” and cut her off when she was speaking.

The nurse described Mary’s appearance as “well kempt” and wrote that she had been wearing “soft trousers, top and a cardigan”.

In fact, she had been unable to wash her greasy, straggly hair for over a week, and was wearing pyjama bottoms, a vest she wears in bed and an old cardigan that was two sizes too small and had two buttons missing (having had to spend much of the last three years in bed she has put on weight, so few of her clothes now fit her, and she is rarely well enough to do any clothes shopping, even online).

Mary said: “Almost the entire Atos report is lies. Or things being twisted. Wilfully misunderstood.

“I have so much anger from the way I was treated by this process. The ‘nurse’ from Atos should be struck off from working in any sort of healthcare job.

“She was very fast and hurried. I couldn’t keep up – and kept telling her this.”

She said the nurse was “bullying and heavy-handed” and “kept twisting things and putting words in my mouth”, and “dismissed anything I tried to say”.

She was found ineligible for PIP and had intended to appeal but “overwhelmed by the level of detail requested by DWP” and its impact on her impairment, she conceded defeat last summer."
 
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2,391
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UK
This does not surprise me at all. It is a long time back now, soon after my wife was diagnosed with ME. She had been for an assessment and when the result came back (sorry, cannot recall the detail now) everything was marked completely at the healthy end of each scale - every single metric, without exception. It was clear to us there had to be observer bias, else at the very least some of the scores would have been away from the end stops. I put a letter together (a very good one, though I say it myself), which emphasised that we found this phenomenon "deeply worrying"; that every day several times a day my wife experienced the same kind of "hitting the wall" energy drop that marathon runners experience; and that I would love to see the nurse who examined my wife cope half as well as my wife did under the same circumstances. A perfectly civil, utterly factual, but no-holds-barred letter. A while later my wife received a cheque with all the relevant sums backdated. My guess is that from there on the nurse was probably instructed to include a few low but non-zero scores for better effect.

Edit: And as my wife has just reminded me, she sat waiting for over an hour, with no-one else in front of her. The strong suspicion being that they wanted my wife to be well-rested before the assessment.
 
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2,125
The strong suspicion being that they wanted my wife to be well-rested before the assessment.
Or that she could sit in a chair for over an hour; my ESA assessor put down that I had been sitting for the whole of the assessment which was a lie. I sat on the sofa for the first half but was lying down for the second.........something that was conveniently omitted from the report.