Imaginary wheelchairs & other ESA changes

As you may or may not know on the 28th January they are making some more changes to ESA assessments. Both of the proposed changes are dangerous and counter productive (unless you want to produce a super-flawed, biased and unfair system). They go a little something like this;

Imaginary Aids, Adaptations & Treatments

In a nutshell, they will be changing the system so that if a person could do something with appropriate aids/adaptations or has a condition that sometimes benefits from a specific treatment (even if they don’t have access to them) they can be judged as if they do. They also do not have to ask your opinion about it.

An example would be; a person who attends a meeting and explains that because of a condition, let’s choose chronic pain, they cannot walk 50m. The assessor decides that they think that with a wheelchair they could do it. The assessor then says nothing to the claimant and notes it on the assessment form. The person is then found fit for work or placed in the WRAG rather than the support group on the basis of an imaginary wheelchair. Of course, they don’t then give the person access to a wheelchair. They just seem to expect them to magic one out of thin air. Bitter experience has taught me that the NHS doesn’t give wheelchairs to a lot of people who would benefit from them. It’s also taught me that getting a NHS wheelchair doesn’t mean you can use it. If your home is at the bottom of a hill, has steps in and out, doesn’t have wide enough halls or door ways or any other number of issues are at play the chair is just a (often) ugly reminder that you can’t get out. Getting your home adapted for a wheelchair is very difficult at the best of times, heaven forbid you privately rent and your landlord doesn’t want you to ramp the front garden. All this doesn’t take into account our imaginary claimants ability to propel a wheelchair either. It would be laughable if it wasn’t a real threat.

The same goes for treatments. Did you turn down CBT for Fibromyalgia? If they think it would have made it better then they can “imagine” how you may have been if you’d had it and assess you accordingly.

Ignoring the Intersections Between Physical & Mental Health

The ESA50 (the pink form claimants get sent asking them to detail their conditions) is split into two sections; Part 1 (‘Physical Disabilities’) and Part 2 (‘Mental, cognitive and intellectual function assessment’). At the moment people who experience problems such as poor bladder control because of a mental or cognitive disability will explain that in part 1. Now they are proposing to make it so that only the effects of “a specific bodily disease or disablement” will be considered in part 1, whilst Part 2 will only consider the effects of “a specific mental illness or disablement”.

This is a massive issue as many conditions have both mental/cognitive and physical components. It’s also problematic because many physical health problems exacerbate mental health conditions and vice-a-versa.

How to help

Sue Marsh over at Diary of a Benefit Scrounger has issued a rallying cry and offers some great advice about what you can do to help fight these changes (link to her post).

You can email your MP by going to this webpage and searching for them by your constituency and send them a link to this report. If you don’t want to email them then you can tweet them with a link to the report saying something like “Dear [MP name] please read this report about damaging changes to ESA http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/ESAbriefing  #esaSOS”.

You can try to spread the word by tweeting, emailing & facebooking others (friends, family, reporters, councillors , and asking them to spread the report too.

Courtesy of Pseudo Living