Live online · In-house option
Mental Capacity, Consent & Restrictive Practice: Applied Skills
Move beyond MCA theory and learn how to apply it to everyday care.
About the course
Learning that makes
a practical difference.
Many staff can recall that people should be assumed to have capacity. The greater challenge is applying the Mental Capacity Act correctly when faced with complex everyday situations.
What happens when a resident refuses medication? What if someone wants to leave the home? Can family members insist on bedrails? When does supporting someone's safety become restraint? Can medicines be hidden in food? Does having dementia automatically mean a person lacks capacity?
This scenario-based programme helps staff translate Mental Capacity Act principles into everyday practice.
What you will learn
- The five principles of the Mental Capacity Act
- Presumption of capacity
- Decision-specific and time-specific capacity
- Supporting people to make their own decisions
- Unwise decisions
- The two-stage capacity assessment
- Consent in day-to-day care
- Best-interest decision-making
- Family involvement and the limits of family authority
- Lasting Powers of Attorney awareness
- Advance decisions awareness
- Least restrictive practice
- Recognising restraint and restrictive interventions
- Bedrails, sensor equipment and locked environments
- Medication refusal
- Covert administration
- DoLS awareness
- Recording capacity and best-interest decisions
- Escalating complex situations
Practise real situations
- Refusing personal care
- Refusing medicines
- Wanting to leave
- Family requesting restrictions
- Residents at high falls risk
- Sexual relationships
- Choices involving diet, alcohol or smoking
- Disagreement between the resident and family
Who will benefit from this course
Care staff, senior carers, nurses, team leaders, deputies and managers.
The benefit to your service
The programme addresses the critical gap between knowing the MCA principles and applying them correctly in practice.
Read the course introduction
Many organisations can demonstrate that staff have completed Mental Capacity Act training.
The harder question is what happens when staff actually face a difficult decision.
If a resident with dementia refuses their medication, does that automatically mean they lack capacity? If someone wants to leave the care home, can staff stop them? If a family asks for bedrails, who makes that decision?
CQC has highlighted that staff may have received MCA training but still struggle to apply that knowledge correctly.
Our Mental Capacity, Consent and Restrictive Practice course is therefore scenario based.
Staff practise making decisions around consent, capacity, best interests, least restrictive options and documentation using situations they genuinely encounter at work.
The aim is safer, more lawful and more person-centred decision-making - not simply another MCA certificate.