My Department is committed to having sufficient staffing resources at its disposal to ensure that people with disabilities who apply for and avail of the Department's supports and schemes in this area are provided with a quality and timely service in relation to their claims processing. Given the significant number of people seeking these services, the Department needs to scale and manage its capacity to provide medical assessment services both to the flow of new clients and to the cohort of people who are already claimants on illness and disability schemes.
The Medical Review and Assessment Service (MRAS) in conjunction with individual scheme business sections, co-ordinates and manages all referrals for assessment to the Medical Assessors.
The Department offers a number of schemes on illness, disability, carers and occupational injury and referrals vary in volume and frequency of applications both yearly and seasonally.
High volume and resource intensive schemes like Domiciliary Care Allowance and Disability Allowance would have a higher proportion of Medical Assessors delegated to these schemes. Medical Assessors are assigned to specific schemes on a daily basis.
A dedicated fast-track system is in place between the office of the Chief Medical Advisor/Deputy Chief Medical Advisor and all scheme business areas, to facilitate referral of claimants with serious and poor prognosis medical conditions, for expediting assessment and processing of claims.
The Department endeavours to maintain adequate Medical Assessor capacity in staffing, and following a successful recruitment process in 2018, all vacancies are currently filled, see table below.
The following figures show the number of Medical Assessors employed by the Department for the years 2017 to 2019.
Summary
|
2017
|
2018
|
2019
|
Total
|
33
|
30
|
33
|
FTE
|
29.9
|
27.3
|
30.3
|
I hope this clarifies matters for the Deputy.