Mental Capacity Act Useful Information

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The following tools are designed to assist you in ensuring that you have correctly applied the Mental Capacity Act and accompanying Code of Practice when making a capacity assessments and/or making a particular decision for a person who lacks capacity.

These tools can be used to document the process via a print out version available at the end. However for complex or life changing decision making it is recommended that you use the formal recording tool available on CF6 (Mental Capacity Assessment FACE Form v6).

Decisions that cannot be made under the Mental Capacity Act

There are some decisions that we are not entitled to take on behalf of someone else.

You cannot decide for somebody else:

to enter into a marriage or a civil partnership;
to have sexual relations;
to a decree of divorce being granted on the basis of two year’s separation;
to dissolving a civil partnership on the basis of two year’s separation;
to a child being placed for adoption by an adoption agency;
to the making of an adoption order;
to the discharging of parental responsibilities on matters that do not relate to the child’s property;
to giving consent under the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act.
to enter into a legal contract such as a tenancy agreement
to vote

There are also some decisions which will require a ruling from the Court before you can proceed. They are situations considered to be requiring ‘serious medical treatment’ and are cases involving but not restricted to the following:

decisions about the proposed withholding or withdrawal of artificial nutrition and hydration from a person in a permanent vegetative state or a minimally conscious state;
cases involving organ or bone marrow donation by a person who lacks capacity to consent;
cases involving non-therapeutic sterilisation of a person who lacks capacity to consent.

The Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards (DOLS) Decision making tool is designed to assist you in establishing if you may need to make an application to the DoLS team (01392 381767). Reference should always be made to the DoLS Code of Practice to ensure compliance with legislation but this tool may help in formulating your thinking.

Please Note: Before using the eHealthTracker webpages from a DCC PC for the first time please e-mail ACSITAssistance-mailbox@devon.gov.uk with the number of your PC and request that it is added to the machine group “App.OpusPlexusPlugin_8.0_a.Machine”

This only needs to be done once, before your first time of using

http://www.ehealthtracker.org/DOLSdev.htm

http://www.ehealthtracker.org/BIdev.htm

http://www.ehealthtracker.org/MCAdev.htm

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MCA Assessment form image - PDF icon (23KB - pdf help)