I have just returned from five weeks in Africa. I went to the World Psychiatric Association meeting in Cape Town.
It so happened that on the way I went to the Kruger National Park, the Serengeti National Park, Zanzibar, Tanzania, Kenya and then drove the Garden Route from Port Elizabeth to Cape Town, all fabulous and astonishing. I managed to film some animal porn of two lions mating, typical, no foreplay and the act took 15 seconds!. I had the amazing experience in the Serengeti and in the Ngorongoro crater of seeing thousands of a zebra, buffalo, wildebeest, camels, elephants, hippopotami, lions, leopards, cheetahs, hyena and warthogs, amongst others.
But that is all by the bye. I attended a workshop at the WPA on Impairment Assessment in South Africa. The system is very different, there is no real workers compensation and transport accident schemes as such but a significant number of people make claims on their insurance policies particularly with total and permanent disability. A working group has been developing guidelines. There was a real sense of déjà vu particularly with regard to looking at the question of psychiatric opinion that was all over the shop.
All of you would be familiar with the usual requirements about contents of reports, opinions, reasons for opinions and so forth. Regrettably there is some talk about using AMA 6 and I strongly urged that this would be a mistake.
I will continue to be in contact with the working group to assist them in refining the document.
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