Capita Employee Reviews For Disability Assessor

I was briefly a DA – it is a job of extremes, with about 10% thriving on it and 90% being in the most miserable place mentally and emotionally they’ve ever been in their life.

Training is a little hard but fun, with a cohort starting at the same time. You make some friends, and it is paid – a good salary. 5 weeks easily passed.

There are essentially 3 variants of the job.
1) Paper-based, where someone’s dependence is obvious, from records and medical notes. Boring, but easy money if you’re IT literate.
2) Mainly clinic-based – you stay in clinic and people come to you. You listen to their tales and look for EVIDENCE of what they tell you. Their diagnosis is irrelevant in and of itself; independence, or specifically evidence of it, is what is assessed. This is not pleasant, basically because nearly everyone lies though their teeth to you and is clearly obvious, but you can bear it and write the report and be home before typical working hours would usually allow. HOWEVER very few areas allow you this – 90% are not this lucky.
3) Mainly (read, almost always) home visits. This is mental, physical, and emotional torture. The day is not 9-5pm. Read, 7:30am – 10pm to assess and submit reports. Some of reports will be returned to you by daily audit for 6 months (!), so next day you will have 7:30am-10pm PLUS amendments. Rinse and repeat. The actual assessment will be 5% people who ought never to have required an assessment, i.e. terminally ill or not compus mentis. >90% will be blatant, ill-informed liars who attempt to emotionally blackmail you – as a AHP, this is so, so obvious – not least when you meet these supposed ‘invalids’ playing tennis at a local club or out for a days’ shopping… again, none of these clowns are informed enough to realise that clear EVIDENCE of DEPENDENCE is what is being assessed – diagnosis is completely and utterly irrelevent. Further, the audits will (apparently arbitrarily, though very occasionally logically) require you to change your report, and by default that will possibly change that person’s award. You MUST do this, if audit demands it, to emphasise that a person was basically lying. IF someone gets a lower award than previously (which they will, it being PIP, not DLA, and therefore actually representative of how they are affected – i.e. not very) YOU are challenged, and complaints filed against, despite nearly always the decision reflecting the requirements of the audit, not your actual report. Despite attacks on these fronts, it remains that:
you have to tolerate an hour of a person’s lying and aggression (in their home, usually rough and/or intimidating) 3-4 times a day, arrive home when hours ought to be finished, only to start approx 4-5 hours solid of typing, to have this rejected and returned, and ultimately a complaint filed against you when you finally get it submitted. This, considering what you are actually outputting is FACTUALLY CORRECT – the vast majority who are on PIP are neither entitled to it nor in need of it, and they are bitter when this is evidenced.
Of all the take-aways from this, it is the revelation of the nature of the clients that made me most miserable – a corporate, cold, ‘you-are-expendable’ management I get, considering they pay well, and it is nothing new. However, the truth-tellers (DA assessors) are those who suffer unbearably whilst liars (almost the entirety of the supposed dependents) are trod carefully around and either re-assessed with minimal difference or ignored.

TL:DR – management don’t care a fig. Job is utter torture, unless you land on your feet with location. It is only those lucky few who hae a hope of progression. Clients are >90% verifiable, clinically and medically inconsistent, aggressive liars who will ensure you are complained against for telling the truth, so they get an extra £10 a week. This latter, and the >80 hour weeks means it’s 100-1 you won’t last 6 months.

What I learned: Most PIP dependents are liars. Most managers don’t care.