Ten Reasons Why The CQC Must Investigate The WCA Programme

Reblogged from Work Test Whistleblower:

1. The CQC is a regulatory body that serves the pubic interest. The Care Quality Commission exists to make sure that care services in England provide people with safe, effective, compassionate and high-quality care. They put people who use services at the heart of their work and they say that they have an open and accessible culture that encourages people who work for service providers to blow the whistle to the CQC if they have concerns about the level of care in their organisation.
2. The CQC is there to protect the vulnerable. It acts for people under the care of their GP, people in hospital, people undergoing compulsory psychiatric treatment, people being cared for at home by social services, and people living in supervised accommodation. It takes an interest in the quality of care displayed during medical screening tests; it looks at how blood products are transported; and it even oversees what happens to people stuck up a mountain, with a broken leg for instance, whose care needs are remotely assessed by a doctor hundreds of miles away, using a satellite telephone!
3. The WCA programme is delivered by a healthcare organisation. The current provider is Atos Healthcare. On its website, Atos Healthcare says it is "proud to lead improvements in the way care is delivered, giving control to patients" and describes itself as a "leading provider of healthcare services". Atos reports that it has established relationships with the medical royal colleges, the General Medical Council and the Nursing and Midwifery Council. Under "Clinical jobs in disability assessment" Atos say it carries out medical advice and assessment services on behalf of the DWP by carrying out clinical examinations and other procedures - something which they say "calls for enormous sensitivity and skill".
4. The WCA is carried out by health care professionals. About 750,000 medical assessments are carried out by Atos Healthcare each year - that's equivalent to a regiment of soldiers every day or two. This huge task is performed by well over a thousand health care professionals: nurses, doctors, physiotherapists and occupational therapists, who are all of course required to be fully trained in their respective professions and to be registered with their professional body. Atos doctors must be both registered with the GMC and have a Licence To Practise (which allows them to treat patients by carrying out surgery or prescribing medication). The DWP insists that doctors possess a Licence To Practise before they carry out a single WCA.
5. Undergoing a WCA can harm a person's health. The DWP's Chief Medical Adviser told the Scottish Parliament that "For a lot of people, the process is distressing. We should recognise that any sort of assessment that has a financial implication will produce anxiety and distress in those who have gone through it".
6. The WCA is seriously flawed. Even the DWP admits this. It told Atos earlier this year to retrain all its assessors and it has called in external auditors to investigate the quality problems within the WCA programme - an audit that began several months ago and is still underway. Last week the Prime Minister admitted at PMQs that "Everyone...knows that we need to improve the quality of the decision-making", after a question from Dennis Skinner MP, in which he described the terrible suffering of a terminally ill constituent.
7. At least 1 in 7 are wrong. Even going by the DWP's own figures, about 15% of all of these assessment outcomes are subsequently found to be wrong. The people affected are those with significant disabilities.
8. People on low incomes are facing hardship as a result. A wrong decision, based on a report generated by an Atos health care practitioner, will result in substantial loss of income for a disabled person. An appeal can take a year to be heard.
9. The testing process demeans vulnerable people. There have been reports in the news of a disabled person being described as a fire hazard and of another being left abandoned and alone after a fire alarm was activated in the assessment centre.
10. No one else will help them. The hundreds of thousands of disabled people going through the mincing machine of the WCA programme have no one to give them a voice. That is why the Care Quality Commission must act.