Care England Mental Capacity Act implementation survey: report

Findings of a survey of care home managers to look into how successfully the Mental Capacity Act (MCA) was being implemented on the front line of residential care. Respondents answered questions on the five principles of the MCA, and the questions asked how well they lead and supported their staff teams to understand and enact these principles. This research shows how some managers take a range of approaches to MCA implementation. Mentorship, coaching and active, floor-based management seemed to recur in the answers from managers who really wrote confidently about their staff team’s understanding of the MCA. One of the greatest apparent barriers to MCA implementation was information and knowledge not filtering down in homes where managers considered that the MCA, capacity assessments, Best Interests Decisions and DoLS were the concern of managers only, when this should not be the case and all staff should be engaged with, and inform these processes.