Wisbech woman has work published in the British Journal of General Practice
Fenland-based critically acclaimed disability studies researcher has had her work published by the British Journal of General Practice.
Resident in Wisbech, and now in her twelfth year of independent disability studies research, Mo Stewart is a Fellow of the Centre for Welfare Reform.
She continues to identify the preventable harm created by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), who adopted a fatally flawed assessment model in order to limit access to disability benefit.
Consequently, the chronically ill and disabled community now live in fear of the DWP, which has had serious consequences for public mental health.
Having recently been acknowledged for the calibre of her research with an ‘Outstanding Paper 2020’ Emerald Literati Academic Award, in November 2020, Mo’s latest evidence has just been published by the British Journal of General Practice (BJGP), which has 50,000 regular readers from the medical profession.
‘A Catastrophic Indifference to Human Need: the Mental Health Crisis Created by the DWP’ was published by the BJGP on January 6.
Mo said the article is already attracting a lot of interest from GPs, who grow increasingly frustrated and concerned at the negative health impact endured by their patients who are too ill to work, yet are regularly subjected to the Work Capability Assessment (WCA), which has failed all academic scrutiny.
She explained: “Every clinical authority in the UK, including the British Medical Association and the Royal College of General Practitioners, insisted that the WCA should be abolished, due to the identified preventable harm it was always destined to create. Their concerns were all disregarded. There is an identified growing mental health crisis in the UK created by the DWP, which is why I attempt to be published in significant and influential journals.
"Having established that the DWP has negatively impacted on the mental health of the chronically ill and disabled community when using the WCA, there is now another mental health crisis suffered by many of the able-bodied unemployed since the introduction of Universal Credit (UC).
"UC is the latest out-of-work scheme adopted by the DWP to restrict access to public funds.
Introduced to combine six existing benefit schemes, academic research from a team at Liverpool University exposed the UC assessment as negatively impacting on the mental health of the able-bodied unemployed, due to the complexity of the UC application and the relentless DWP challenges as to why the claimants are unemployed. Therefore, the unemployed benefit claimants are just as afraid of the DWP as are the disabled community.
"This ongoing persecution of anyone who isn’t in employment is now the norm, as the DWP disregard all academic evidence demonstrating the link between their flawed assessments and the growing mental health crisis in the UK.”
