Heather Humphreys (Cavan-Monaghan, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Each scheme has multiple conditionality such as medical, caring, means and residency. A key criteria is that the applicant satisfies the medical-related conditionality. To assess this, the Department employs its own team of more than 30 doctors who have a mix of skills and specialties and who are specially trained to assess the impact of a medical condition on a person's capacity to work or on his or her care needs. The focus is not to disallow a claim but to try to understand the impact of the underlying condition on the claimant or the person in their care.

Often when a claim is appealed, we find that applicants provide additional information to that provided with the initial claim. This is the main reason appeals succeed. There are a number of reasons applicants do not submit this information with the initial claim, partly because they may not have had reports from specialists or consultants available to them when they made the claim but they wished to establish a claim date as early as possible. That is understandable. People sometimes say to them to get their claim in, they put the claim in, and then follow up with the additional information, because when the claim is granted it is backdated.

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