Dr. Devesh Singh:

I will clarify one thing about the medical assessment. I really want this to go out. People who have serious disabilities or medical conditions need not fear. I do not know how to emphasise that we are not trying to catch people out; we are trying to support people to address the cost of living, as in this categorisation, we expect people with more severe conditions to have higher costs. That is what we are trying to do. The medical assessments we do in the Department have evolved with time. We have looked at other models. Many jurisdictions have moved from the old-fashioned traditional medical model that believed disability to be the result of a health condition and that to alleviate the disability the health condition needed to treated and did not have any regard to the psychological, social and environmental barriers. Moving on from that model, the UK and other jurisdictions follow a functional capacity model which is a little more involved. It takes into account a range of actions someone can perform and gives descriptors to the range. The range of actions or activity is divided into five grades and gives them a numerical value. The descriptors are a description of the range a person can do. There are descriptors for all the body faculties and mobility is treated separately. There are numerical values and the medical assessor's job is to explain the action, observe what the person can do and assign a numerical value. It is a little fragmented. It is not a complete picture of the disability as a whole and how that person can function in society. We have moved from that system to a more recent one that derives fundamentally from the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health, ICF, from the World Health Organization, WHO. Like we have the international classification of diseases, ICD-10, we have the ICF, which not only looks at the biological condition, but also at the psychological sequelaethat can arise from a primary mental health condition. It is often seen as a chronic sequelaeof long-term ill-health, chronic pain and so on. It tries to take that into consideration and how that person functions and participates in society.