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This website provides information on how Atos runs its business, extracts from the Contract between the DWP and Atos including the MEDICAL CONDITIONS that mean a face to face medical assessment is not always necessary, ASSESSMENTS AND POINTS, the breaches of Contract that occurred in my case, my unsound medical report and the correspondence showing how difficult it is to obtain justice or advice.
The Government is inviting the public to submit petitions. Search epetitions.direct.gov.uk for "DWP" or "Atos" or "disabled" to list relevant petitions including Stop and review the cuts to benefits and services which are falling disproportionately on disabled people, their carers and families (http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/20968).
Other ongoing petitions are Petition against constant vilification of sick and disabled claimants and Petition to "Sack Atos Immediately" .
The DWP occasionally consults the public http://www.dwp.gov.uk/consultations/.
Atos developed the discredited LiMA (Logic Integrated Medical Assessment) software for use by Atos doctors and Atos nurses to carry out "medical" assessments on behalf of the Department for Work and Pensions.
Critics have described LiMA (Logic Integrated Medical Assessment) as "tick box" software.
The LiMA software assessment used by Atos Healthcare is a 'tick box' occupational health computer assessment and is designed and used for efficiency, not accuracy. This assessment tool is unacceptable for a comprehensive evaluation of any chronically sick and/or disabled person. The possible answers offered are limited in scope when compared to the possible variances of medical conditions and enormous range of possible physical disabilities. This type of software may be a useful tool in an occupational health department, for example, when confirming that staff are fit enough to consider certain work related activities if their fitness is in doubt; not their health. This would usually be carried out in a company, where the staff are considered to be fit enough to be at work, and not in a clinical assessment situation where the actual physical wellbeing of the patient is under consideration.
Extract from the Manual
Note however, that when you click one of the lists to open it, you may not find all the usual choices available to you. LiMA uses its database of logical rules to restrict the available choices to only those that fit the information you have already provided
Curtailment of high scoring cases has been developed in conjunction with the Department for Work and Pensions as a way of reducing the time to complete lengthy cases where many activities are affected by multiple disabling conditions.
Curtailment is managed automatically by LiMA and reduces the amount of justification required in high-scoring cases. Based on your choice of descriptors, LIMA will only ask you to justify those activities needed to comfortably exceed the benefit threshold, beginning with the activities with the greatest apparent functional loss. (For those parts of the assessment that are curtailed, LiMA will automatically insert an appropriate standard summary phrase into the printed report.)
My case (brain tumour) demonstrates that "comfortably exceed" is completely arbitrary. It could mean that if targets for denial are not being met then more should be denied.
As a "non medical" model for assessing medical conditions is being deployed (Unum evidence to Parliament) the recommendation by Atos is arbitrary.