Welcome to Communicating Capacity! Thank you for visiting this site.

This site is designed to provide information, education and support for people working in care roles with people who experience communication disabilities. 

On this site, we focus particularly on how we can all support people with communication needs to participate in decision-making. We all have a responsibility to provide support so that people with communication needs can exercise their right to autonomy and retain control of their lives. 

The site contains five main sections:

• E-learning – designed to support you to learn how to work more easily and effectively with people with communication disabilities. It will show you ways to support people with communication disabilities to make decisions, for example during a mental capacity assessment.
• Mental Capacity Assessment Support Toolkit (MCAST) – this is designed to help you to prepare, complete and document mental or decision-making capacity assessments. It provides specific materials to help you support people with communication needs during mental capacity assessments.
• Guidance and information – this page includes links to guidance about supporting people with communication needs to participate in decision-making, including legal guidance.
• Research – this page includes links to recent research on communication disability, decision-making and mental capacity that you may find useful.
• Communicating Capacity blog – this page features blog posts by a range of people on the topic of supporting people with communication needs to exercise their right to autonomy.

Whilst some of the content shared on this site relates to legal processes that are unique to the UK, we think that visitors from other countries will still benefit from using this site.

We ask you to register to use certain aspects of the site so that we can monitor use of the site. When registering, we ask you to consent to us sending you short surveys twice a year. In these surveys, we will ask you what you think about the site and what we could do to improve it. 

This site has been developed by Mark Jayes and includes a lot of Mark’s own work on this topic. Mark is a speech and language therapist who works at Manchester Metropolitan University in the UK. You can contact Mark if you have any questions about the site or about his work by emailing him at m.jayes@mmu.ac.uk