The Chair (John Dearden) and Director (Alan Martin) of Haemophilia Scotland were recently invited to visit and meet staff at the offices of IBCA in Newcastle. This was a welcome opportunity to have small group discussions with the Chief Executive, Directors, Senior staff and the various teams working within IBCA.
The day started with a walk round the floor and a chance to talk to members of the teams at their workplace. We were able to talk with the fraud team, the quality assurance team, a claims team where we were able to see how they processed claims and allocated new claims to team members, ensuring that there was a constant uptake of new claims. We gained a better understanding of how systems were being developed to ensure that processing was in accordance with the Regulations and delays were being avoided where at all possible.
The remainder of the day involved small group discussions with different functions including:
Claims Managers – We met with Sindy Skeldon (Operations Director) and four staff members. They all presented a clear intent to support claimants in their journey through the system and in taking a can do approach in identifying relevant evidence to support claimants. On the day we visited a further group of 40 Claims Managers had started their first week of training.
Comms and Engagement – We had a wide-ranging discussion with Rachel Forster (Communications Director) and the Deputy Head of Engagement, on the IBCA’s approach to community engagement and how this was being developed. Of note was the intention of the Board to appoint a Community Panel comprising community representatives able to offer views to the Board. We discussed the challenges in setting up such a group given the diversity of interests within the community. Selection of representative individuals was a key factor whilst ensuring the Panel was not unwieldy, but equally ensuring that the divergence of views was represented. The IBCA are now in the process of seeking views from the main representative groups and campaigners on this proposal.
We talked about the value of the webinars and how these might develop to provide a focus on specific topics or themes and how the work of the existing Comms Advisory Panel might develop. We offered comments on how the current web-site might be further expanded as a more accessible resource for claimants. The IBCA are active in looking at opportunities to improve the usefulness of the site.
Service Design – Celine McLoughlin (Director of Digital and Services) and a member of her team outlined their role in designing systems and processes aimed at transforming many currently manual processes in the claims journey into a more comprehensive, IT-based approach. This would help to speed up the claims processing systems and shorten the time between stages.
It was hoped to issue an expanded claims calculator incorporating some of the aspects of claims by the affected within the following few days with more functionality added soon thereafter. This is now live. We and other community groups had the chance to view a demonstration of how the enhanced calculator would work. The calculation of entitlement for the affected is more complex than for the infected already registered with the support schemes. The work on the calculator shows that these complexities can be reduced to a workable system. We will publish a separate article on the expanded calculator. If you want to view the calculator on the IBCA website just now, use the following link: https://ibca.org.uk/estimate-your-compensation
Data and Evidence – The Deputy Director of Data and two of her colleagues described the work of the Data Team who were actively looking at how relevant information required to evidence claims could be more readily be harvested from various sources without the need for claimants to source evidence themselves and reduce the manual process for Claims Managers of going through historical records. This included information from the Support Schemes, the Caxton House former Trusts, the Haemophila National Database and other sources, including Registrar General statutory records on births, marriages and deaths. The team were taking active steps to ensure that if information had to be sourced from health records there was an established system for doing this which was well known to those working in the health sector. This will avoid the need for individuals to make data subject requests, which out of context can be disruptive to clinical staffs’ normal day to day work.
Counter Fraud – The Head of Fraud talked us through IBCA’s concern that the Scheme may be open to fraudulent claims and the steps being taken to ensure that only genuine claims were processed. There was also concern that individual claimants may be subject to fraudulent approaches e.g. in terms of unscrupulous investment opportunities or phishing. The IBCA were working closely with counter fraud organisations and the banking sector to raise awareness of the issues. Their general advice is that all claimants should seriously consider taking up the free financial advice service which was being made available through IBCA by selected financial advisers. There was no obligation to use these advisers other than for the initial advice session. We would support this approach, along with taking up the offer of funded legal support during the claims process.
Conclusion
We found the visit informative and provided a valuable opportunity to exchange thoughts with the Chief Executive and others within IBCA. Our impression is that IBCA are implementing a range of innovative ideas to speed up the claims processing after the initial test and learn process. For infected person claims the IBCA are now increasing resources and systems to deliver a significantly increased level of claims processing. As noted in the 14th of May Newsletter from IBCA they have said they expect to “have brought in to claim all those who are infected and registered with a support scheme this calendar year”. We understand that this means that they hope to have the vast majority of claims from the infected who were registered with the support schemes as of 31st March 2025 processed, or in process, by the end of 2025.
For the affected, the systems are still in development, but we could see active work is progressing on this. The publication of a revised calculator shows that they have made good progress on developing the systems which will enable them to start processing claims from the affected. Meanwhile individuals can get an indication of the level of compensation to be expected by accessing the calculator when the latest version is released. Please remember that the calculator is only as reliable as the information input to it and the outcome is not an offer of compensation.
From the evidence presented to the Infected Blood Inquiry in May, there are potential changes to be made to the compensation scheme. We do not know the extent of these at present, but hope they will not cause delay in the processing of claims. Any adjustments can hopefully be made subsequently.