Hi all. I recently wrote to my MP asking him to raise awareness of ataxia among the medical assessors with the DWP. A number of people among this community and Support Group have raised concerns about the assessors' knowledge of ataxia and how us ataxians are treated during this assessments.
Below is his reply;
''Dear Mr *********
Thank you for your email and for sharing your concerns about awareness of ataxia, particularly among medical assessors.
I have raised your concerns with Ministers at the Department for Work and Pensions and asked for their response. As soon as I hear back from them I will let you know.
I hope you feel this is of some help to you.
With good wishes.
Yours sincerely
John
John Healey MP
Wentworth & Dearne ''
I hope this will lead to a better understanding of ataxia and how we are all treated at medical assessments.
Maybe if a few more ataxians write to their own MP's (via their website is better...its recorded.. ), awareness and fairer treatment will come sooner.
GOOD LUCK
Written by
Capricorn9157
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Thank you for doing this. After the most unbelievably awful and inaccurate assessments, I had someone intelligent come to my home. I, despite being a normally very determined person, could not deal with the crushing lies and simple disbelief in initial assessments. All is OK now, are any of you fellow sufferers are still getting this appalling treatment? I could hardly do anything at all at that stage.
I did exactly the same thing and I was made to feel pretty small, I also contacted the PM's office through complete frustration and they basically treated me politely as mad! The best option for me was to follow every complaint that you can take against the DWP all at the same time. Anyone want copies of letters that worked for me then I am sure there is a way that I can put them out there!
my gp sent the assessment team a letter which was in support of a home visit as i can not get about without my wheel chair and somebody to push me due to having weak arms. The assessment team decided to send me a taxi,instead. so, it meant i could not attend the appointment. Long and short of it is I will now have to prove to them why i could not attend, so the letters you sent will come in handy to me. although i am not sure if you are able to email them?
That is where it all went wrong for me, my GP also supplied a letter that he sent straight to the DWP asking for me to have an assessment at home, somehow it all went wrong, I should be well over this as I am going back to 2016. What basically happened was the DWP stopped my ESA payments on the basis that I did not attend an appointment, which I was never going to attend. This meant I had to go through the appeal process. It was six months before they started paying me anything again, another month to get my back payment on that another year before I actually got my home assessment. To sum up signed off work august 2015, assessment June 2017 and to top it all in March 2019 it turned out that they had been under paying me since the start. So I know how wrong it can go, but I do think they really did start to get bored with my letters
Sorry I just sent a manic post, I think it depends on who your local MP is, mine was trying to be helpful although it was her office workers that I spoke to and they were nice. I found out that there was not even a single disabled site within 10 miles of my home let alone any person that they knew of that had Ataxia, other people might be lucky so I should have been more thoughtful, although if anyone does want any help with letters I really mean I can help!
I am ok now I did put a few posts out at the time, but I don't want anyone to go through the two years that I had to. 2016 was the worst year ever and trying to survive with so little money while I was spending half of my life travelling backward and forwards to the hospital for tests, Much calmer now, but I do not rate my local MP at all!!
I would really like to help anyone that ends up in the same situation as I did, hopefully it was just my bad luck!!
Fingers crossed!! I have just had my assessment and am waiting for the result. Having worked for 23 out of the past 27 years I hope they will be kind to me. Good luck to you, best wishes for the future.
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), awareness and fairer treatment will come sooner.
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