Mental Capacity Report - September 2020

Welcome to the September 2020 Mental Capacity Report. Highlights this month include:

(1) In the Health, Welfare and Deprivation of Liberty Report: updated MCA/DoLS guidance, the anorexia Catch-22, and two important cases on deprivation of liberty;

(2) In the Property and Affairs Report: remote witnessing of wills, professional deputy remuneration and the OPG annual report;

(3) In the Practice and Procedure Report: CoP statistics, short notes on relevant procedural points and the UN principles on access to justice for persons with disabilities;

(4) In the Wider Context Report: the NICE quality standard on decisionmaking and capacity, litigation friends in different contexts, and a guest piece giving a perspective on living with a tracheostomy and a ventilator;

(5) In the Scotland Report: the human rights blind spot in thinking about discharge from hospital in the context of COVID-19.

You can find our past issues, our case summaries, and more on our dedicated sub-site here, where you can also find updated versions of both our capacity and best interests guides. We have taken a deliberate decision not to cover all the host of COVID-19 related matters that might have a tangential impact upon mental capacity in the Report, not least because the picture continues to change relatively rapidly. Chambers has created a dedicated COVID-19 page with resources, seminars, and more, here; Alex maintains a resources page for MCA and COVID-19 here and Neil has resources on his website here.

If you want more information on the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which we frequently refer to in this Report, we suggest you go to the Small Places website run by Lucy Series of Cardiff University.

Click here for the screen-friendly version of the Report

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