Agapanthus
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
I think Fightback are good for people who can send them all the relevant medical reports and medical evidence to work through, but less so for people who cannot manage this. They can pick up internal contradictions in an ATOS or CAPITA medical report, but if you have contradictory or poor medical evidence they can't deal with this issue. I see that they have to charge due to lack of funding to cover their costs, but that doesn't help the most vulnerable people who can't afford even their modest fees. They are probably most useful to people who live locally to them and they can help in person.
I was told they can help with wording of the MR if you do it yourself, via their chat function on their VIP forum (£12 a month to subscribe to) - but that requires energy and cognitive ability too. Same with using their VIP library and guides.
@Simbindi I am guessing that the Facebook group I am in feel that what they do is similar, as they provide a buddy service (which I used) to look over your paperwork. They do all that for free and it's very good advice.
I asked the DWP for the assessor's report weeks before my son had his decision, and was quite shocked by it. However it was difficult to challenge it as the issues were quite subtle to deal with. I doubt that the DWP will read all my stuff on it as I have written at some length on them, maybe too many pages I feel now. I had a recording of the interview and I can see that he misconstrued some things that my son said to back up his points, and he was able to quote from this psych as his prize witness as it were - kept calling it the 'doctor's factual report' when it was far from that.
It took me a long time to sort it all out as I thought that the GP surgery had also written something on this report or collated it. We did 2 Subject Access Reports to the GP and to the DWP but the GP surgery came up with nothing, and the DWP took 40 days to come up with just this one report from the Psych. In fact the Assessor had also asked his neuropsychiatrist for a report but as it arrived a bit later on it was not sent to the DWP we think, and if they had read that too they could have seen that he had relapsed. All of this is now sent on to the DWP for the MR.
So I think that this would not all have got sorted out by someone else, maybe even Fightback, as it's tricky to comb through it all. My son's mental health issues mean that he sleeps a lot and is really out of things and not able to communicate at normal times either. It took me 4 weeks to write the Recon letter as I began on it before the DWP report came in knowing it would be bad. As things happened, the Assessor recommended nothing and the DWP decision was for 8 points which as we know is useless.