Centre for Policy on Ageing



Mental Capacity Act (England and Wales) 2005 — The emergent Independent Mental Capacity Advocate (IMCA) Service
Author(s)	Marcus Redley, Isabel C H Clare, Lydia Luke
Journal title	British Journal of Social Work, vol 40, no 6, September 2010
Pages	pp 1812-1828
Source	http://bjsw.oxfordjournals.org doi: 10.1093/bjsw/bcp135
Annotation	The Mental Capacity Act (England and Wales) 2005 (MCA) introduced the Independent Mental Capacity Advocate (IMCA) service to ensure that the views of adults who lack capacity to make particular potentially life-changing health and social care decisions are represented to substitute decision-makers. This paper presents quantitative and qualitative data from an evaluation of the pilot IMCA service that preceded the introduction of this new, statutory, form of advocacy. Importantly, our findings suggest that in more than half of the decisions completed during the period of the evaluation (54 per cent of 109 completed cases), clients were able to provide some indication of their wishes, enabling them to participate directly in personal decisions that they were unable to make autonomously. We discuss the implications of our findings both for the development of statutory advocacy in England and Wales and for other models of substitute decision-making. (KJ).
Accession Number	CPA-101111222 A
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing

...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing.