An Interesting news article

http://dwpexaminations.blacktrianglecampaign.org/phpBB3/

I have recently discovered this news article I have reproduced it here as I think it has great bearing on our situation.

Acknowledgement;

The article below is taken from the Mailonline website

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1021686/How-doctors-like-punished-exposing-sicknote-scroungers-whistleblower.html

How doctors like me are punished for exposing sicknote

scroungers, by a whistleblower

By Dr Jakes Branton
Last updated at 10:31 PM on 24th May 2008

Barely able to walk, the 55-year-old man entered my examination room clutching a walking stick and leaning on a friend for support. I was told I couldn’t touch him because he was in so much pain. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked him. ‘I’ve got chronic fatigue syndrome, doctor,’ he wheezed. ‘I’m in agony. If someone so much as touches me I get a searing pain through my body. I’m not sure I can bear much more of this.’ My job was to assess whether the patient, a former factory worker, qualified for incapacity benefit.  

On the face of it, this looked like an open-and-shut case – but then I peered a little closer. For a man who didn’t get out much my patient had a surprisingly good tan. He also had calloused hands and broken nails which indicated recent manual work. A few standard questions revealed he managed to do his own shopping, take the rubbish out and still had the energy to drive a car. Within five minutes, I realised this man was faking it – trying to avoid work and secure himself £87.50 a week in benefits.

There are many others like him and there is even a comedy character based on the most extreme examples: millions of TV viewers are familiar with Little Britain’s Andy, who pretends he is wheelchair-bound but who walks around freely the moment his carer Lou’s back is turned.

The right thing to have done, of course, was to file a report stating my findings. But nothing is that simple in the weird world of incapacity benefit. In fact, incredible as it sounds, doctors who report false claims are actually punished and risk losing their jobs. As a result, every year more than 70,000 people fit enough to work are given the go-ahead to claim benefits – saddling the taxpayer with an annual bill in excess of £300million. I should know. For blowing the whistle on this ridiculous state of affairs I was suspended by my company, Atos Origin. I later left and I am now taking the company to an employment tribunal.

A French conglomerate, Atos has a £500million contract with the Department of Work and Pensions to carry out checks on patients claiming incapacity benefit. Currently, people are entitled to statutory sick pay for up to 28 weeks. All they require to claim this is a certificate from their GP. After this period, the DWP sends a file to Atos. Up to 60 per cent of people are weeded out immediately as having clear disabilities and are automatically awarded benefits. But the remaining cases, which are regarded as borderline, are referred to Atos examination centres so that doctors like me can assess them.

In total, around 30,000 patients are seen every month. But there are two main problems. The first is a lack of information. Despite the patient’s GPs in theory being obliged to supply notes about their case, doctors like me often receive little more than a two-word assessment such as ‘back pain’ and frequently nothing at all. What’s more, Atos actively discourages its doctors from calling GPs and requesting more information because it believes this takes up too much time. This wouldn’t matter so much if we were allowed time to conduct a thorough examination. But unfortunately most of each 25-minute appointment is taken up with a questionnaire from Atos, leaving little more than a couple of minutes for physical checks in most cases. This is simply not enough time to verify a patient’s claim.

Even in those cases when it’s obvious that a patient is lying, doctors find themselves compromised. The reason? Government targets. Under the contract drawn up between the DWP and Atos, there are a large number of financial incentives for meeting targets across a broad range of measures. One of these targets concerns the number of complaints from patients. If the company keeps the complaints from claimants below a certain level then it makes more money.Conversely, if the complaints rise, it loses money. There is, therefore, an in-built incentive to avoid aggravating the patients.

Doctors soon find out that if they give a claimant low scores and the claimant is denied benefits, they are more likely to find themselves the subject of a complaint. These patients, after all, are not visiting examination centres to be given medicine or treatment – they are there to get money. If they don’t get the money they’re not going to be happy. And if a doctor at Atos racks up more than three complaints in three months, he is disciplined. First, he is warned by his supervisor. If the problems persist he is given, in effect, a final warning that his work will be cut or that his registration to work will be revoked.

Against that kind of backdrop, Atos doctors soon work out that low scores mean trouble. What’s more, they have their own incomes to consider. When I was there I was paid £40 per appointment. If I worked hard, I could earn £4,500 a week. Some of my colleagues pulled in as much as £5,000. They weren’t keen to upset the apple cart and I don’t blame them. Even the civil servants at the DWP were complicit. They wanted to avoid complaints clogging up the system and, when I was at Atos, I was often called by the DWP and asked to bump up a patient’s score. I was never asked to downgrade a score.

When Atos won a new contract from the DWP in 2005, my colleagues and I were told that management was going to have a ‘zero-tolerance’ approach to meeting targets. Sadly, they didn’t mean they were targeting bogus or mistaken claimants – no, they were more concerned with the doctors who wanted to weed those kind of claimants out of the system. That year I received my most serious complaint after failing someone who was taking double the required dose of his medicine and mixing it with whisky. The medication was not meant to be mixed with alcohol and I reported this back to his doctor. But saving patients from killing themselves, apparently, was not my job. The patient complained, the company investigated and, amazingly, found in his favour.

This helped crystallise concerns in my own mind and I went to my supervisor, Dr Gail Young. She took me seriously and agreed to investigate. Her subsequent analysis of the statistics showed a clear correlation between claimants who were denied benefits and complaints made. But, even with this evidence, the Atos management did not want to know.

The reason was obvious: if they acknowledged the problem – and, worse, if it became public – it would endanger their contract with the DWP. By March 2007, both Dr Young and I realised we had a duty to the taxpayer to blow the whistle on this sham. Dr Young was already on sick leave because of stress when I had my final meeting with local managers. They refused to commission an independent investigation. A couple of days later we sent letters to the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, David Cameron, the DWP and senior Atos management. We were both suspended and Dr Young later resigned.

An Atos investigation flatly denied our allegations even though an independent statistician who was called into assess the investigation suggested there was a relationship between complaints and unfavourable reports from doctors. Atos maintained doctors did not alter their scores.

Both Dr Young and I are now confronting the company before an employment tribunal. She is claiming constructive dismissal and I am claiming for loss of earnings. But there is much more at stake here than our careers.

Not only is the system wasting a huge amount of taxpayers’ money, it’s also encouraging a culture of dependency and all the evidence shows that people placed wrongly on benefits become unemployable, depressed and subject to many real health problems.

If we succeed in changing this culture, then we feel our decision to speak out will have been worth it.

• Last night the DWP said: ‘This matter is between Atos and the tribunal, not DWP. Our target is to get a million more people off incapacity benefits by 2015 with tests and back-towork support focused on what people can do, not what they can’t. Last year 31,000 more people came off incapacity benefits and got into work.’