Access to Work

B is a freelance artist, delivering some workshop sessions and developing her own arts practice. She is a wheelchair user.

B first approached Access to Work around five years ago. When she received the forms, she made a call to them and felt completely put off by what she describes as their medically-based and aggressive attitude. She says, ‘the man on the phone was vile. I started giving him the information he asked for, but after my name and address he asked me what my disability was.  I didn’t think he meant diagnosis, so I told him I was a wheelchair user because I had a mobility impairment.  He sounded annoyed and said I had to tell him my diagnosis.  I said it was a genetic disorder and gave him the (unusual) name, whereupon he said “Yes, but what does that mean?”  I felt forced at this point to describe symptoms, in a level of detail that I do not normally feel comfortable doing, like how it affected my bone structure. I said I’d like to be able to hire a personal assistant.  He told me flat out I couldn’t have one.  After a pause, he explained this was because Access To Work didn’t call them personal assistants, they called them support workers’.

B spoke to the man’s superior who agreed that his attitude had been unacceptable but B never received the complaints form she had been promised.

She did receive the completed form which summarised the information she had given about her medical condition: ‘on the form I was simply classed as someone who was ‘deformed’.  At this point my confidence was in my boots’.

More recently, thanks to the encouragement of friends and colleagues, she decided to approach them again. She was told she needed an assessment from her local wheelchair service. Unfortunately, due to delays with the service, she missed the deadline she had been given to return the form. B says that she has given up hope of getting any help with a wheelchair for her work from Access to Work because of her local difficulties. She thinks there may be a way round the situation but can’t sort it out because she is finding Access to Work too difficult to talk to.

B describes the process as difficult not least because ‘there was definite suspicion when I said I was self-employed.  This made me angry.  Self-employment is a perfectly reasonable thing for a disabled person to do – isn’t it?  Yet again I felt the person on the other end of the phone couldn’t quite believe what I was telling them – I felt like they were suggesting I was delusional when I said I was a professional artist – and that they suspected the reality was that I draw a couple of pictures in a supported group every now and then’.

B has found the whole process distressing and disempowering and describes her relationship with Access to Work as ‘iffy’ saying that she feels she is about to be ‘judged’ and she has ‘had enough of that everywhere else already’. She says she is ‘very suspicious of staff disability awareness’.

She concludes that ‘I need their help in the future and am a bit more battle-scared nowadays, so this time I will keep pushing for help.  The difference is if this time the process is prejudicial at any stage, I will complain until something is done about it rather than backing away – at this point in my health, the consequences are that I would be out of a job.  Which is allegedly something the government doesn’t want’.

Moral of the story
Complain if you receive shoddy treatment from Access to Work and, as B says, keep complaining until something is done about it.

You need to decide whether you are prepared to get involved in a conversation which is medically-based, in order to give Access to Work the information they may say they want.

NEWSFLASH
Access to Work is reviewing its training programme for advisors and is planning to equip advisors with a stronger social model basis for their work. This would have avoided the unpleasant experience that B had with her advisor.