so
welcome to cck live my name is nicholas briggs i'm an accredited va practitioner here at chisholm
chisholm and kilpatrick and today i'm joined by fellow accredited agents michelle de torre and
frank padula and today we're going to be breaking down va disability benefits questionnaires
so first what is a dbq dbq is a downloadable form
created for veterans use in the evaluation process for the disability benefits claims
dbqs are intended to speed up the processing of the claims by having a single standardized process
through which medical practitioners can provide evidence in support of a veterans claim
and it's designed to give a veteran more control over their disability claims process
by allowing them an easier way that they can bring their own practitioners into the process and again
these forms were created by va to answer specific questions about important aspects of their
disability including symptoms severity possible causes and relationships to other disabilities
and these are the exact sorts of questions that va wants answers to because it aids them in both
determining whether or not service connection is warranted and what the proper rating for the
disability should be once service connection is granted so with that in mind frank could
you tell us a bit more about how dbqs work yes so first it's it's really important to stress
that while veterans that are able to access these forms they are not permitted to fill out
these forms themselves instead veterans have the option of visiting a private health care provider
or even a va health care provider who could complete the evaluation on their behalf
and again it's really important to know that veterans cannot fill out the dbq form on their own
but when having a private health care provider fill out the dbq form it's also important for
veterans to do the following you know so first you can access the form online and download it
second you can bring that form to your provider and have your private doctor or even
or health provider complete that form on your behalf third you want to review the findings of
the form and save a copy for your own records as well and then fourth you want to submit that form
to va in support of a claim or an appeal the forms use they're streamlined and they use check boxes
and standardized language so that the disability evaluation can be made quickly and correctly you
know and specifically the healthcare providers can simply just check a box next to descriptions
that most accurately depict the disability in question and you can use the dbq forms
also provides veterans with an improved means to submit medical evidence to support their claims
and when completing the forms it's important for veterans to just be honest about their symptoms
in order to ensure that all documentation accurately reflects the level of impairment caused
by the claimed disability great thanks for that frank and michelle turning to you could you tell
us a bit more about which specific conditions are covered by the different dbqs yeah so one way or
another almost every condition is covered by a dbq so right now there's about 70 different disability
benefits questionnaires that you can find on va's website so there are ones that are condition
specific so some of them are very specific to a certain condition like there's a ptsd one
there's an arthritis one there's a prostate cancer one some of them are going to be more generic like
there's um other mental disorders one there are ones like heart conditions or kidney conditions
where it's not for the specific condition but it's the overall umbrella of heart issues or
kidney issues um and your condition will be fallen there a lot of them will say for the doctor to
check off what the actual condition is under the umbrella of the jet of the general like heart exam
one or the kidney one so it does break it down a little bit more granular as you go through it
but for the most part if it's not covered so if it's not specific or covered in the umbrella of
one of those other ones what they'll end up doing is giving you what we call a general medical
examination um which is supposed to be kind of an umbrella to cover all the ones that aren't
specifically listed in there um so a good example is if you have generalized anxiety disorder there
could be a couple different disability benefits questionnaires but you're going to usually get the
other mental health disorders questionnaire there are a lot on there so you know when you
are going to bring one to your doctor you want to make sure that you're using the correct one
because you don't want to give va any opportunity to discredit what you're giving because it's not
filled out for the correct condition so that's just something to be mindful of and if you're
not seeing your condition on there then usually you want to default to the general medical one
um there are some conditions not covered by dvqs a lot of times it's you know prisoner
of war examinations sometimes you see cold war injury residuals or initial examinations for ptsd
when we say there's no specific exam for cold war residuals it's because they
usually will send you to an examination for what that residual is you'll see that with a lot of
residuals it's you know they're not going to say here's your traumatic brain injury
residuals they're going to say your residuals are migraines here's a migraine examination
and it's because they want to be making sure that they're using the correct criteria
for that condition and that condition itself is readable under its own diagnostic code and has
its own disability benefits questionnaire so that's kind of why you won't see examinations
really for residuals it usually then goes condition specific like diabetes a common
residual is peripheral neuropathy and that has its own disability benefits questionnaire
that is completed so a lot of times just because you're not seeing it on there
um doesn't mean that it doesn't exist it's just it gets done a little differently um in some of the
va forms yeah exactly like michelle mentioned there are going to be certain circumstances where
there are these additional residuals they have their own forms they're being considered and
oftentimes examiners will complete two three four sets of the dbqs all at the
same time to make sure they're addressing all of your symptoms that's why it's important to
just be upfront and report everything that way they can use the appropriate forms as needed
with that in mind generally speaking we've gotten a sense over the years of how frequently requested
some of these dbqs are and they tend to be in line with how common some of the service connected
disabilities that many veterans experience so for example hearing loss and tinnitus
is generally the most requested dbq online as many veterans suffered acoustic trauma in service and
have some form of hearing loss or tinnitus due to service but some other common dbqs are for back
disabilities knee and lower leg disabilities and then like michelle mentioned mental disorders and
all of the different dbqs that fall under that umbrella so with that in mind it's important to
know where you can find these dbq forms because it hasn't always been the easiest to locate them
unfortunately va provided them online with their own public-facing website for a long time
but around the time that the kova 19 pandemic started and without prior notice
va abruptly removed all public-facing versions of dbqs from its website
so at that point veterans lost that resource they were no longer able to just pull them whenever
they wanted and there was no guarantee that if they looked online they would get the correct form
all because the public-facing websites were shut down
luckily this has changed as a result of the 2020 national defense authorization act
and as a result of that act the forms are now available again on va's website and again this
is important because making these forms publicly available and accessible gives veterans both more
insight into the examination portion of their claims and gives them a means through which they
can get their private providers to provide va with the information they need to decide their claims
obviously va provides these forms themselves on their website but frank are there any other
places that veterans might be able to find these forms yes so as nick previously mentioned va
did remove these forms in the past they did this because va believed it had sufficiently expanded
its own capacity to conduct these va examinations but cck has and will continue to provide the dbq
forms for veterans to access on our own website and the link to those can be found in this video
great thanks for that frank so we've covered most of the basics of dbq forms and sort of how they
work and what veterans should do and not do when they're trying to get them completed do either
of you have any additional closing thoughts or remarks that remarks that you'd like to make
reminders things like that i think it's important to ensure that the whole form is filled out
correctly meaning some personal identifying details uh signatures and dates there's a couple
of different spots for those so i would just make sure to take a look at those and again make sure
that they're all filled out correctly before you submit it to va i love to use these to help
counter va examination so i always tell veterans that i'm working with that you know if you can
have your specialist fill out if it's you know a back condition have your orthopedic doctor if it's
your site condition have your psychiatric treating doctor because it's a lot easier to counter
sometimes showing that a specialist completed this and it's also really nice if they've been
treating you for a while to say well you saw this examiner for 30 minutes and this doctor is
a specialist in their field and has been treating you for x amount of years so that's usually some
advice that i do give to some clients that we work with great thank you both and one final
reminder like we mentioned up top these forms are meant to be filled out by medical providers
although the veterans ultimately going to be providing a lot of the information themselves
as they answer their medical providers questions these are meant to be filled out by doctors so
that va can then weigh the evidence against their own va examinations so that's something to keep in
mind and that's why it's also extra important to do like frank mentioned and make sure that
the doctor is clearly signing the forms providing their name providing any identifying information
that you need that way va can rely on it without needing to see clarification so with all that in
mind like frank mentioned again we provide all of these dbqs on our website um so we'd like to
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