Have you had a work capability assessment, the medical test for employment and support allowance?

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hope some of you willl fill this in, our chance to have our say. Not done it yet myself but will do shortly..if you copy and paste the link below it gives the same info as below and will lead you to the online questionairre

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Employment and Support Allowance > Harrington

Have you had a work capability assessment, the medical test for employment and support allowance?

Or better still, have you had more than one?

If so, Professor Harrington, the independent reviewer of the WCA, wants to hear from you as he gathers evidence for his third independent review.

The deadline for responses is 7th September 2012.

Why it matters

It’s vital that as many ESA claimants as possible respond to Harrington and tell him whether the changes he asked the DWP to make to the process after his first review have made any difference.

If you think the WCA has improved, then it’s important that Harrington can tell the DWP that they are moving in the right direction and should keep up the good work.

If you think the WCA is no better, or even worse, then it’s very important that the DWP can’t get away with claiming that thanks to the changes they have put in place, claimants are now much happier with the system.

Or you may think some things have got better, such as communication by decision makers for example, whilst other things have not, such as the opportunity to have your medical recorded .

There’s a problem

Unfortunately, Harrington’s team have not made it easy to respond to the latest call for evidence. The ‘survey’ is a list of questions at the end of a .pdf document, which claimants have to try to copy and paste or reype in order to take part.

You can download the full call to evidence from this link,

Text version

To make it as easy as possible for you to give evidence, we’ve done two things.

We’ve reproduced the questions in a rich text document which you should be able to type answers into and then either email as an attachment to Harrington or copy and paste into an email.

You can download the text document here.

Use the online questionnaire

Alternatively, we put the questions into an online questionnaire. You can complete this and have your answers emailed to you. If you’re happy with your answers you can then forward the email to Harrington’s team as your response.

If you do use the online questionnaire, there are some points to remember:

You MUST forward your results email to Professor Harrington at [e-mail] if you want him to see it, we only send it to you.

You have 20 MINUTES to complete the questionnaire before the session ends. If you need to type long answers to some of the questions you may want use the text file above.

There is a maximum limit of 2,000 characters for each of the boxes, again if you’ve lots to say, use the text questionnaire above.

You can start the online questionnaire here.