WCA - Quality monitoring of HCPs
Dear Department for Work and Pensions,
In your response to FOI 4050-4303 (http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/de...), you wrote that "the quality monitoring of HCPs is carried out by a number of mechanisms within Atos Healthcare. This includes regular audit of reports by accredited auditors using the (IQAS) system and the monitoring of complaints."
The accredited auditors are Atos staff, the IQAS system that is used was developed by Atos and complaints are dealt with by Atos staff. It appears Atos is monitoring itself.
1. What measures are in place for independent external audits of the work undertaken by Atos?
2. If no measures are in place, please state the reason(s) why this is not considered to be necessary.
3. If measures are in place, what are the measures? Provide supporting documentation.
Yours faithfully,
A Smithson
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Dear DWP freedom-of-information-requests,
This is a clarification of Q1 of my FoI request. By independent external audit, I'm referring to any audits done by anyone not employed by Atos or the DWP.
Yours sincerely,
A C Smithson
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Dear Mr Smithson
Please see your FOI response attached
Kind regards
Health & Disability Assessments (Operations)/Department for Work and Pensions/Room 306/Block 31/Norcross/Norcross Lane/Blackpool/FY5 3TA
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David Alfred left an annotation ()
Having now retired my long and fractious relationship with the WCA side of DWP has ceased. I had 3 consecutive erroneous WCAs all overturned on appeal and in trying to get to the bottom of why, was labelled a UPC (unreasonably persistent customer) and treated as a pariah from that point on. WCA/Atos performance was a key issue but incredibly DWP chose not to even attempt to measure either false “positives” or false “negatives” the simple reason being that they didn’t want to know – on the one hand they weren’t interested and on the other would have been embarrassed by the results.
Although there were probably no laid down targets for the HCPs doing WCAs, individual pass/fail rates were recorded and those at the bottom of the rankings (i.e. too many passes) were made aware that this was the case and that the only possible cause could of course be their over-generosity – the other perfectly feasible reasons were all ignored, so slowly the ratios were subtly nudged in one particular direction.
DA