No abstract

Keywords: Road Traffic; Accident Civil claims are complex. In 2014, the association of British Insurers found that 6% claim costs were represented by fraud and 5 -10% of claims were not genuine [1]. The court requires appropriate evidence from a variety of sources: claimant self-report, medical notes (GP and Hospital), occupational records and expert clinical and legal judgment. However, the starting point is the claimant providing their own information about the circumstances and after effects of one particular 'index' event. An expert witness called upon to interview the claimant and formulate an opinion is faced with assessing claimant credibility and reliability.The 'holy grail' of being able to assess reliability and truthfulness is investigated one step further via this case study utilising a credibility checklist with a road traffic accident claimant. The possibility of operationalising unreliability in a numerical, or at least, an informed narrative way is explored in this innovative study.There are many potential areas of unreliability in assessing personal injuries, both physical and psychological and these impinge on both clinical and medico-legal processes [2][3][4]. The fundamental psychosocial basis for interviewing is the claimant's communication style consisting as it does of verbal and non-verbal components. It is this area that has resulted in a significant psychological literature on 'unreliability, lying and malingering' as it relates to the evaluation of an individual's presentation at interview and can inform experts as they consider the truthfulness and validity of a claimant's reported experiences [5][6][7][8]. The 'holy grail' of deception detection is to try to operationalize many behavioural cues into an assessment process to judge credibility in a medico-legal setting [7][8][9][10]. Development of a Credibility ChecklistThe Portsmouth group of researchers [10-12] collated a selection of verbal and non-verbal cues indicative of potential 'lying/ malingering' or 'truthfulness' , based on available literature and interviewing techniques. The resulting pilot checklist tool was evaluated in an experimental way in terms of its usefulness in discriminating truthful interviewees from those who were malingering [10]. Interviewees using this checklist achieved 75% correct classifications of truthful interviewers and 66% correct classification of those who were exaggerating symptoms. Interviewers who were not given the checklist did not classify their interviewees at a level significant better than chance (50%). This study indicated that further exploration of the use of a checklist by interviewers in a medico-legal setting was required with further refinement of item scoring, inter-rater reliability and test/ re-test reliability. A significant next step would be how the checklist and its use could offer the courts some reassurance that the expert could operationalize his/her own 'clinical judgement' of claimant reliability. This might be achieved by use of a structured aide memoire base...