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.
So your taught that everyone’s a liar that’s not on really some people milk the system there’s no allowance for people who need medication just to get there my wife fell over an unsecured carpet inside an assessment centre and during the interview actually shit her pants she has a bowel problem exassipated by spina bifida and she was asked when she expects to be better these people are a joke and know little or nothing about the condiditions in front of them she was refused pip but got it on mandatory reconsideration three years on and the same bloody performance again