Good afternoon and thank you, Mr. Chair and committee members, for inviting us to appear before you today. It is our pleasure to be here to speak about the department's disability adjudication process and our ongoing work to modernize our disability benefits tools. Joining me are Trudie MacKinnon, director general of centralized operations division, and Melanie MacDonald, team lead in disability benefits.
Before we start, I would like to provide an update on the status of the processing times of disability benefit claims. I am pleased to share that we are currently under 6,000 files beyond the 16-week service standard. This is a significant 70% reduction from March 2020, when the number of files beyond the service standard was over 22,000. While we recognize the reduction and the efforts of our staff to reduce wait times for veterans, we acknowledge that there is still progress to be made.
We make progress on these turnaround times by adjudicating claims as efficiently as possible. There are two steps in the decision-making process. In the first step, the adjudicator determines entitlement, which is whether the disability is related to service. In the second step, the adjudicator makes an assessment of the severity of the disability and its effect on the applicant's quality of life.
Veterans Affairs Canada has numerous decision-making tools to help adjudicators determine entitlement and assessment. However, the two primary tools VAC adjudicators use are the entitlement eligibility guidelines and the table of disabilities. We have spoken about these in previous committee appearances.
The entitlement eligibility guidelines are policy statements that ensure the consistency, equity and quality of decisions made on the relationship between a disability and military service. The guidelines are based on evidence from peer reviewed medical research and literature, both in Canada and abroad.
The table of disabilities is a legislated instrument used to assess the extent of a disability. The tool helps the adjudicator establish an assessment based on a medical impairment rating in conjunction with quality of life indicators. This is an assessment of the impact of the impairment on the individual’s lifestyle.
While the guidelines and the table have seen various additions and ad hoc updates since 2005 and 2006, we recognize the need for continuous updates that keep pace with medical research and reflect a sex and gender based analysis plus lens. As a result, we are currently in the midst of a multi-year plan to modernize both tools.
To ensure the modernizations are informed by sex and gender research, we have developed a tailored GBA+ methodology to guide our work. We used documents from Women and Gender Equality Canada, the Veterans Affairs GBA+ strategy, the GBA+ policy, step-by-step guides, and consultation with the Office of Women and LGBTQ2 Veterans.
The application of our GBA+ approach will ensure that our clients see themselves reflected in our tools, because we have considered the varied and diverse health experiences of Canadian military and policing communities.
In addition to modernizing our decision-making processes, we are reducing processing time inequities for francophone and female applicants by modifying our approach to staffing. For example, since 2020, we have hired more bilingual and francophone disability adjudicators to increase our capacity to process French applications. As of September 2022, roughly 30% of our decision-making staff are francophone or bilingual. In September 2021, we added a team dedicated to processing applications from female applicants.
This approach is working, because the gap in processing time between male and female applications has been nearly eliminated, falling from seven weeks in 2019-20 to one week as of the end of March 2023. We have also cut the gap between French and English applications in half over this same period.
Further to these efforts, we aim to simplify and create additional efficiencies in decisions, ensure the veteran is at the forefront, use up-to-date health literature and best practices to support evidence-based decision-making, and support equitable, transparent, and consistent disability benefit decisions.
Thank you very much.