3. Managing therapy or monitoring a health condition

I want to argue 8 pts under 3f

Needs supervision, prompting or assistance to be able to manage therapy that takes more than 14 hours a week.

In a case where clt is undertaking peritoneal dialysis at home far in excess of 14 hours per week but dialysis is performed alone for the vast majority of time.

My argument being that the wording of the descriptor does not necessitate that the promping or assistance exceeds 14 hours p/w, only that the treatment lasts >14 wks and also that some assistance and prompting is required. In this case it is clear that without the assistance, clt would be unable to undertake any of the treatment at all.

Obviously DWP’s guidance does not support this. Anybody have any thoughts?

Not looked at the guidance or the descriptor before responding but based on your extract of it, I’d agree with you.  If they’d meant the number of hours to qualify the supervision etc as opposed to just being a reference to the duration of the treatment itself then, presumably, they would have used the word “continual” before supervision etc.

How the 50% of the time business ties in with this is another matter.  I haven’t started to seriously consider some PIP descriptors yet.

I’d agree with you, as well. I’d expect the prompting or assistance to be a significant component of the treatment, however, and it might be a bit much to ask for 3F where the prompting is once per week for a few minutes. Perhaps if the prompting or assistance were on each occasion, that would be enough to do it. However, if this prompting would be of the same frequency where the treatment was 3.5-7 hours per week, what is the relevant distinction there? The implication of the descriptors is that there is an important difference between descriptors 3d, 3e and 3f. As to what that is, I think would need more thought.