Her 4-year-old son has celiac disease and type 1 diabetes, requiring multiple daily insulin injections for survival. He is also hypo unaware, meaning he doesn\u2019t show symptoms when his blood sugar drops, which can be fatal.<\/p>\n
In a letter accompanying the woman\u2019s benefit application, a Starship doctor wrote: \u201cIt is essential that all individuals involved in [the boy\u2019s] care are appropriately trained and confident in the management of his diabetes.\u201d<\/p>\n
The letter included nine bullet points detailing the constant, intensive care and monitoring the boy needed, and life-threatening consequences if that care was not delivered.<\/p>\n
Despite that, the woman was declined the Supported Living Payment \u2013 though she only found out when she called Work and Income about another matter.<\/p>\n
She said: \u201cIt was more of sort of a side question of, \u2018by the way, what\u2019s happening?\u2019.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd somebody told me that it had been declined because its level of care wasn\u2019t considered to be high enough.\u201d<\/p>\n
She never received a written decision or explanation and decided not to argue the case, saying: \u201cI just sort of figured they\u2019ve decided it\u2019s diabetes, they don\u2019t cover diabetes and that\u2019s the end of it.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, she contacted RNZ after reading a similar story and RNZ\u2019s inquiries have revealed MSD was mistaken.<\/p>\n
She said she was frustrated by that, adding: \u201cI don\u2019t think that it was reviewed properly because the information that I gave them and the certificate from the doctor … said that, \u2018no, this was something that would require a lot of additional care\u2019.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe is in hospital quite regularly, and that sort of thing, that seems to meet their criteria.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know who is reviewing these things, what qualifications they have and what understanding they have of the conditions that they\u2019re considering.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a statement, the Ministry of Social Development\u2019s client service delivery group general manager, Graham Allpress, said the woman should have been granted the benefit.<\/p>\n
He said she was originally declined because it was considered that the level of care her son required didn\u2019t meet the \u201cinstitutional-level care\u201d threshold.<\/p>\n
He said: \u201cWe apologise to [the woman] and her son and will work with them to correct this decision.<\/p>\n
\u201cOn review, the information from the doctor and paediatric expert outlines the significant level of care her son needs, and that this requires her to be present and available for him throughout the day.\u201d<\/p>\n
That was not fully taken into account initially, he said.<\/p>\n
– RNZ<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Her 4-year-old son has celiac disease and type 1 diabetes, requiring multiple daily insulin injections for survival. He…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":378213,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[95,21972,76547,2084,62240,3535,7191,2083,48460,111,43,139,69,22639,102,1354],"class_list":["post-378212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-and","tag-benefit","tag-celiac","tag-crimp","tag-declined","tag-diabetes","tag-disease","tag-lauren","tag-mistakenly","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-son","tag-with","tag-woman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=378212"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378212\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/378213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=378212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=378212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=378212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}