Personal Independence Payment – recent coverage

From the Atos website http://blog.atoshealthcare.com/category/disability-assessment/

Personal Independence Payment – recent coverage

Personal Independence Payment (PIP) is being introduced in April 2013 and Atos Healthcare has been selected by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) as one of the delivery partners in the UK – excluding the Midlands and Wales which will be delivered by Capita.

It has been suggested that, when bidding for the PIP contract, we stated in our tender document that we were already collaborating with a number of stakeholder organisations about our PIP solution. However this isn’t the case. We have been absolutely clear both in our tender document and with the DWP, that no stakeholder organisation was involved in putting together the tender for PIP.

We have contacted the relevant organisations to explain the context in which they were referenced, both for transparency and to clarify the situation. We welcome a conversation with them, in which they can share their expertise and knowledge with us. Engagement of this kind allows us to improve our service and better understand the needs of our customers.

We respect that disability groups and organisations representing disabled people may choose not to work with us as they don’t wish to be seen in any way to advocate the government policy surrounding PIP or its delivery. However we would, of course, hope that disabled people and their representative organisations would want to work with us to make the delivery of PIP as smooth as possible for those individuals going through the process.

Finally, it’s important to be clear that the introduction of the PIP is a government policy and we have no responsibility for the criteria to determine eligibility, nor will we be responsible for making any benefit decisions.





This is what ATOS said untruthfully in their tender

Atos has a successful record of engagement with Claimant Representative Groups (CRG), Special Interest and Pressure Groups who represent claimants affected by sickness and/or disability, and we have experience and understanding of the challenges and opportunities that this presents.

We make sure that we have clear objectives, and a solid understanding of the engagement intent and messaging.

CRGs are important both as representative groups of claimants with
expertise on specific disability issues and as the first port of call
for claimant concerns with service delivery. Establishing relationships based on honesty and trust will help Atos and the Authority to improve overall understanding of PIP across a wide range of groups, and will feed into continuous service improvement.

We engage with

Citizens Advice,
Mencap,
MIND,
Disability Rights UK,
Macmillan Cancer Support,
SENSE,
Rethink,
RNIB,
DPAC,
Northern Ireland Association for Mental Health,
National Autistic Society and
the Scottish Association of Mental Health

amongst others at a national level and regularly meet with
representatives at a local level to explain our role and discuss their
concerns. We currently have a database of more than 300 local CRGs for outbound communications.