Training
140. Our comments above relating to claimants with
mental health problems and claimants from ethnic minority groups
identified specific training needs, and our section on service
provided to claimants identified a need for training in customer
care issues.
141. Sema's contractual obligations require it to
provide five days worth of training for sessional doctors annually.
However, BASDA told us that "the NDA agreement asked each
doctor to undertake five days of relevant training annually. The
expenses and payment for attendance would be paid. There has been
no specific training or feedback for incapacity benefit during
the first sixteen months of the contract and only sporadic training
for the other benefits where there has been a change of procedure."[144]
142. The Chief Medical Adviser acknowledged that
the training requirement had not been met: "Although I know
that the training delivered to new doctors is of a good quality,
I have looked at the modules and there is specialist input, I
am not happy that many doctors have not received the five days
training that we expected them to have."[145]
143. Medical Services have recognised the importance
of training. Mr Crowden-Naylor, the Director, when asked what
his priorities were for the service, said that "The priority
that we have seen is on the training side. We have both agreed
that we need to put more emphasis on the training of sessional
doctors and support a longer term quality initiative."[146]
144. We have already recognised the importance of
specific areas of training in this Report. As well as the benefits
brought to claimants and the BA decision makers from improved
performance as a result of effective training, a further benefit
would be to make the job more attractive to doctors. As a minimum,
we recommend that Medical Services meet their contractual obligations
to provide 5 days training to all doctors annually. We deplore
the fact that Sema has failed to meet this contractual obligation
to date.
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