A quick reminder about the next meeting of the NW MH WRAG.

The next meeting of the North West Mental Health Welfare Rights Advisers Group will be Friday the 29th of July 2022 at 9.30am for a 10am start.

It will take place “in the flesh” at the Royal British Legion, 5 Princess Street , Manchester, M2 4JW.

There is no speaker this time, so the meeting will be an Information Exchange.

If you have trouble finding/accessing the venue, please contact Helen Rogers at Stockport. Mobile contact details have already been provided by email to existing members so we don’t intend to repeat those here but… come on, with apologies to GMWRAG members who score on PIP mobility activity 1… Google Maps for goodness sake. 

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A sneaky late addition.

A late addition to the documents uploaded in consequence of the last NWMHWRAG meeting. Amongst the questions submitted in advance was a reference at 11a and b to Condition Insight Reports.

IAS have kindly provided a copy of theirs and also given permission for us to share it with GMWRAG members as they consider it a document they’re open to sharing with stakeholders on the basis that the contents derive from partnerships with stakeholders, specialists and their training department.

The document in question can be found in the Presentations sub page of the NWMHWRAG section of our site. We recommend all GMWRAG members have a look at the document in question as it brings into sharp relief the approach HCPs ought to have towards specific medical conditions and highlights a number of obvious omissions.

GMWRAG members with a special interest in those conditions which are not in the document may want, for example, to highlight the omissions to those charities representing those with those conditions. You may even want to offer corrections; updates etc.

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And the next meeting of the NW Mental Health WR Advisers Group is upon us once again.

The next meeting of the North West Mental Health Welfare Rights Advisers Group will be at 10am on Friday the 27th May 2022.

The speakers will be

Zoe Spore from the PIP Advocacy team and

Chris McMahon from Independent Assessment Services.

Zoe and Chris asked for questions to be submitted in advance. Members will have already received a Word document of the questions the group has submitted in advance.

GMWRAG did notice tQ3b and realised that we already have the two answers. They are “the same” and “yes”. If you want to know the question you’ll just have to roll up for the meeting :).

We also noticed a really good question later on and thought “we wish we’d thought of that” and then realised that it was our question.

The meeting will be held on Microsoft Teams. To receive a link to the meeting, please email Helen Rogers by 5pm on Monday the 23rd of May 2022. She will then send out the link on Tuesday 24th May.

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North West Mental Health WR Adviser Group meeting “stuff”. Actually, very interesting “stuff” around IAS and the PIP Advocacy Team.

The next meeting of the NWMHWRAG takes place on Friday the 25^th of March at 10am.

The meeting will be an Information Exchange, including a discussion of the questions which we would like to ask the staff from the PIP Advocacy Team and Independent Assessment Services who are coming to speak to us at the meeting on the 27th of May 2022. Here is a list of the questions gathered so far. You can contact Helen Rogers if you wish to add further questions.

The meeting will be held on Microsoft Teams.  If you want to attend, please email Helen before 5pm on Monday the 21st of March 2022. The link to the meeting will be emailed out on Tuesday the 22nd of March 2022.

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North West Mental Health Welfare Rights Advisers Group Meeting to be rescheduled.

The next meeting of the North West Mental Health Welfare Rights Advisers Group was scheduled to take place this Friday, the 25th of September 2020.

A speaker from Disability Services at Chorlton Service Centre has agreed to speak to about PIP but there have been technology issues.

GMWRAG cannot resist the obvious joke about reasonable adjustments at this point!

The rescheduled meeting will continue to be an online meeting. Details once we have them. Follow @GMWRAGtweets

Open University research into PIP appeals and invisible impairment.

GMWRAG can only apologise for being a little tardy in publicising this (especially as some of us have already signed up). We’d vouch that there’s not a WRO alive in the North West who would not have something of value to add to this if you have ever been involved in a PIP claim from start to end at appeal.

So, here’s the original blurb (kindly nicked donated by Rightsnet).

My name is Alexandra Murray and I am conducting a study on appeal hearings for Personal Independence Payments (PIP). This is to gain a better understanding of how disability is defined in the welfare state and how this impacts on disability benefits.

I am looking to speak with welfare benefits advisers, welfare lawyers and tribunal judges who have been involved in hearings with claimants that had a hidden, less visible, or invisible disability. This is to draw together accounts of PIP hearings from different perspectives to investigate how invisible disabilities are evaluated by the tribunal. To take part in this study, you must have provided advice or represented someone who wanted to appeal their PIP decision.

Participating in this study will give you an opportunity to share your knowledge and experiences of the PIP appeal process anonymously.
What will I be asked to do if I want to get involved?
• To provide a short, written reflection or diary entry based on a time when you were involved in a PIP appeal (at any stage) for someone with an invisible disability.
• To take part in a semi-structured interview that will last for approximately 1-2 hours that will be audio-recorded and transcribed. This will be arranged for a time and place convenient to you.

To take part in the study, or if you would like to know more about it, please contact me via email: Alexandra.Murray@open.ac.uk. Your information will be held in compliance with GDPR regulations.

This project is funded by a PhD studentship in the Faculty of Business and Law at The Open University. This project has been reviewed by, and received a favourable opinion from, The Open University Human Research Ethics Committee, reference: HREC/3369/Murray.

If you’re interested, and we can’t think why you wouldn’t be, then you can also download an information sheet here.

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NAWRA in Wales.

GMWRAG used to be really good at notifying you all about NAWRA meetings. Indeed we used to make our web site do clever things like count down to the day of the meeting but then… well then we just got too busy. So here we are with 3 days left to go to the next NAWRA meeting and we can probably no longer refer to them as “our friends in NAWRA” as we keep messing this up. Anyway…

All NAWRA members are invited to attend their quarterly conference.

Date: Friday the 6th of March 2020.
Time: 10.00am – 16.00pm (registration from 9.30)
Location: Swansea Civic Centre, Oystermouth Road, Swansea, SA1 3SN

Guest speakers will be Fran Bennett of Oxford University on recent research about universal credit and couples followed by Lisa Reese, a tribunal judge, on the role of representatives.

There will be participatory workshops on mixed age couples in UC, conditionality in UC and public law remedies, support for disabled people in UC, and assessing mental health for PIP.

Download the agenda

NAWRA meetings are only open to members.  There’s no need to book a place.  Please let them know if you have any accessibility needs.

GMWRAG has fond memories of their first visit to NAWRA being a trip to Swansea approximately 30 years ago in the back of a some kind of van with people from Flintshire Welfare Rights. Nowadays there would be a hashtag attached to that and some kind of legal action! Nowadays we think the train may be an option.

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Research measuring the impact of applying for PIP on a claimant’s perception of their health condition.

With grateful thanks to our friends at Rightsnet.

Can you help? Catherine from the University of Bedfordshire is wanting to reach people who’ve applied or are applying for PIP.

Are you going through or about to start the PIP application process? This can be a difficult time but, if you can, please spare a few minutes to complete a short online survey.

Your answers will contribute to new independent research into the possibility that people’s perception of their condition changes as a result of going through the PIP application process. It is important as perception has demonstrable impact on levels of depression, quality of life, ability to follow treatment plans and even recovery and survival rates. If there is an effect then this needs to be highlighted and, if not, we can look for other explanations for the experiences that many PIP claimants describe.

The research is part of an Applied Psychology Masters dissertation by Catherine Haslam and has been approved by the University of Bedfordshire’s Psychology ethics board. The survey is short and doesn’t ask any personal health questions. All data is annonymised & aggregated.

Thank you in advance for your help. The survey can be accessed at:

https://bedshealthsciences.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_9uJpGzsLdeEnPpP

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The ink still wet minutes of the probably not even finished last meeting of the North West Mental Health Welfare Rights Advisers Group.

The minutes of the latest meeting of the NWMHWRAG are already available as are the notes from the talk on claiming the mobility component of PIP for people with mental health conditions. Both documents will as ever be stored permanently within the relevant NWMHWRAG pages, and if you wish to check you’ll find they’re already there.

Related to the above the RF High Court Judgement can be found at http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Admin/2017/3375.html and there is an addendum to the notes from the talk:

Psychological distress is defined in the Interpretation to the PIP descriptors as “distress related to an enduring mental health condition or an intellectual or cognitive impairment.”

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