Assessing mental capacity: the Mental Capacity Act

Assessing mental capacity is an important part of a clinician’s role, and the recent Mental Capacity Act can help doctors when making such decisions #### Summary points Clinicians are often confronted with decisions about mental capacity. Healthcare workers in England and Wales should therefore be aware of the recent changes to how capacity is assessed and the way that adults lacking capacity are dealt with since the implementation in 2007 of the Mental Capacity Act 2005.1 The act protects people who lack the mental capacity to make decisions. Until the Mental Capacity Act 2005 was implemented no statutory law covered this area. Courts previously dealt with capacity under “common law,” which consists of the accumulated judgments of individual cases. The Mental Capacity Act is underpinned by five key principles (box 1), which are illustrated in a hypothetical scenario (box 2). #### Box 1: Five key principles of the Mental Capacity Act