Psychologists & Psychiatrists: You can help with the huge VA Disability Claim Backlog

Psychologists & Psychiatrists: You can help with the huge VA Disability Claim Backlog. At the end of 2015 the disability claims of over 70,000 Veterans had been pending for more than 125 days. The VA has not been able to reduce the backlog of disability claims.

Psychologists and Psychiatrists are needed to evaluate Veterans to help determine the extent to which they are functionally impaired. Psychologists and Psychiatrists (as well as other physicians) complete Disability Benefits Questionnaires similar to how they might conduct an evaluation. While there are psychologists and psychiatrists employed by the VA to conduct evaluations, many times the task also falls to VA staff who have little expertise in disability evaluation and are conducting compensation and pension evaluations at the expense of their other duties (such as providing treatment to Veterans).

The VA will sometimes farm out disability evaluations to practitioners in the community; many times this is done through a third party company who will set up the exams. The extent to which any evaluations are being sent out into the community depends on your region. The specific methods, company or companies being used is also dependent on your region. The referral source list on our website http://www.psychology.news includes companies that do this. If you know of companies doing this please pass them on to toddfinnerty@toddfinnerty.com. If it isn’t one that is already on the list and we use it for the almanac we’ll send you the entire list of over 70 referral sources for free. You can also buy the entire list of referral sources right now on our website by preordering The Psychologists’ Almanac 2017 edition. We’ll send you the Almanac in November and the draft list of the referral sources right now.