Getting my clinician to write the letter that mattered

Something that helped was a template somebody here shared, which I rewrote in my own words and which gave me the structure I was missing.

To the opening post rather than to the thread: Ida, this is my version of it.

My employer's HR had a route I did not know existed and it went through in eleven days after four months of getting nowhere myself.

I kept a log of every call with the date and the name and it was the reason my complaint was taken seriously at the third stage.

Mine took four months and three letters and was eventually granted, and I nearly gave up after the first one.

Here, reading, and glad you posted.

What I learned is that the person reading it is following a policy document, and the policy document is usually available if you ask for it.

I asked my prescriber for a supporting letter that addressed each criterion in order, and that was what made the difference.

The flowchart I drew of the process was genuinely useful and I have since sent it to four people in this circle.

Picking up Bodil’s point rather than starting a new one.

Something practical: I sent everything recorded delivery and referenced the previous letter by date in every new one.

My appeal succeeded on a technicality about how a criterion was measured, which I would never have spotted without reading their policy.

What Bodil described happened to me too, in a slightly different order.

I found the process demoralising and the outcome good, and I want both halves of that on the record.

What helped was treating it as an administrative task with steps rather than as a judgement on me, which took me two refusals to manage.

The criterion I failed on turned out to have been assessed on out-of-date information, and correcting that was the entire appeal.