Guidance Note: Relevant Information for Different Categories of Decisions - May 2021

This guidance note sits alongside our guidance note on carrying out and recording capacity assessments, and is designed to assist social workers and those working in frontline clinical settings when they asked to consider a person's capacity to make a decision or decisions. As set out in our guidance note, the courts have now applied the MCA 2005 in respect of very many types of decision. In the course of doing so, they have given indications as to what they consider to be relevant (and sometimes irrelevant) information for purposes of those decisions – i.e. what the person must be able to understand, retain, use and weigh to able to make the decision. This guidance note1 pulls together the guidance given in relation to some of the most common decisions that are encountered in practice in the context of health and welfare matters.

Click HERE to read the Guidance Note.

Click HERE to read our guidance note on carrying out and recording capacity assessments