ACT leader David Seymour’s claims that doctors are erroneously certifying people unfit for work are being labelled as “political rhetoric” by the president of the Royal College of GPs.<\/p>\n
ACT wanted to make it mandatory for all health and disability benefits to be independently issued by an MSD approved pool of designated doctors.<\/p>\n
On a Jobseeker health and disability benefit, people need a work capacity medical certificate from their doctor and would need reapply every 26 weeks.<\/p>\n
In the NZ Herald’s Powerbroker’s debate on Wednesday night, Seymour said he knew people were doing this. He told RNZ on Thursday his evidence was people telling him it had happened.<\/p>\n
Dr Luke Bradford told Checkpoint, Seymour was playing to a proportion of the electorate with his comments, and they were “political rhetoric”.<\/p>\n
“It’s a soundbite, it’s got the attention.”<\/p>\n
He said there would be certain case examples, but the vast majority of sickness benefit sign-offs were for people who were genuinely unwell.<\/p>\n
Bradford said where things often got tricky was around mental health and helping those people transition into the idea that daily activity and work was more useful for them.<\/p>\n
If a doctor was unsure on a person’s fitness to work there was a box on the form they could tick asking for a second opinion from an MSD pool of doctors, he said.<\/p>\n
“My other concern for this policy is where will this pool of doctors MSD uses come from? We’re already under resourced…”<\/p>\n
Bradford said a conversation was needed to help people in the mental health space feel ready to go back to work and not have their mental health impacted by it.<\/p>\n
“I don’t think it’s all on the doctors to say yes or no.”<\/p>\n
Since the Covid-19, Bradford said there had been a rise in cases of anxiety and agoraphobia associated with lockdowns and there weren’t underlying support systems for them.<\/p>\n
“I do not think my colleagues are erroneously, illegally, inappropriately filling these in, in the majority of cases at all.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ACT leader David Seymour’s claims that doctors are erroneously certifying people unfit for work are being labelled as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":638164,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-638163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/638163","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=638163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/638163\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/638164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=638163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=638163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=638163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}