LCWRA HELPO

[Fizzle29]

Posting on behalf of a friend who’s nervous to post herself - with her permission

She had her lcwra assessment yesterday for mental health, she’s been out of work for over 2 years and mental health took a massive downhill spiral, she’s been handing in fit notes consistently since January last year.

Her assessment was around 50 minutes long and she was told because she’s a single parent it’s hard to prove lcwra because she clearly looks after her children? She then said she would try her hardest to prove lcwra because she had given a scenario of intrusive thoughts and what she would do if she didn’t have children and the lady on the phone said something along the lines of ‘that’s what I needed’ and kept pushing for more in depth answers on only certain questions, naturally my friend is extremely anxious it’s been a long wait, she’s been reading online and worked herself up thinking the assessor was just being nice, the assessor did say ‘I am going to try my hardest with this’ she’s just a bit confused and wanted opinions on whether she should be anxious about this or just accept defeat she won’t get lcwra..

Thank you ☺️

The idea of a so called Healthcare Professional suggesting you cannot (a) be a good parent who looks after your children and (b) have LCfWRA makes me incandescent.

LCfWRA is about your ability to do tasks related to work. It's a functional test, a bit like PIP, about things you cannot do.

All she can do now is wait and, if she's turned down get all the paperwork together to ask for a Mandatory Reconsideration and if necessary appeal to the First-tier Tribunal.

What do you mean please? Incandescent? That’s literally what she said ‘it’s hard to prove lcwra when you’re a single parent and manage to look after your children’ she then took me back to a question and made me answer it differently and I said something she then repeated like it was a keyword needed in the assessment. I’m vulnerable and worrying.

The thing is you've done it now wait until you get the results and go from their

It's the attitude of DWP's Healthcare Advisers that makes me cross; very cross indeed.

If they were trying to be helpful and to get you to focus that's one thing but too many of them seem to struggle to approach the task as the law intends.

Mentioned it here before but I was helping out with disability advice locally a few years ago. A woman in her early sixties just managed, with the support of her sister, to walk from the Blue Badge parking area by the door across the atrium of the Civic Centre to our office. Maybe twenty metres. She'd has a heart/lung transplant.

DWP thought she could dance a jig and was fit for work.

Sounds like the assessor was trying to get 'your friend' to say the appropriate things necessarily to get the LCWRA approved.