The Best Interests Assessor (BIA) Practice Handbook is firmly grounded in real-life practice and remains the only textbook focusing directly on the BIA role. Offering clear and practical advice on the legal elements of the role, and the values and practice elements of working within the Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards (DoLS) framework, this is essential reading for BIA students and practitioners.
This fully-updated edition takes account of recent legislative changes, including the planned changes from the Liberty Protection Safeguards (LPS), recent case law and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on BIA practice.
Packed with advice on delivering effective, person-centred, rights-driven practice, it includes:
-
case studies;
-
legal summaries;
-
decision-making activities;
-
CPD support;
-
examples of new case law in practice.
Looking forward, the book considers the new context for practice in the Approved Mental Capacity Professional (AMCP) role within the LPS and the potential roles that BIAs might fulfil in this new framework in the future.
Best Interests Assessors (BIA) are specialist practitioners with a unique professional identity. This is the first book to consider this complex role in depth, offering practical guidance and exploring its particular challenges in the context of the Mental Capacity Act and Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards legal framework.
How can you work with people who lack capacity to make sure their voice is heard? How can you maintain quality of assessments and decision-making while managing an increasing workload? How do you keep up to date with case law and work out how to apply it to day-to-day practice?
The book answers these questions and many more, allowing you to meet the ever-changing requirements of the role, whilst maintaining professional knowledge, values and ethics in practice, now and in the future. Activities including case studies, legal summaries, decision making activities, CPD support and case law will be welcomed by BIA students, practitioners and others interested in the role.
ePDF and ePUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence.
During the 20th century the locus of care shifted from large institutions into the community. However, this shift was not always accompanied by liberation from restrictive practices. In 2014 a UK Supreme Court ruling on the meaning of ‘deprivation of liberty’ resulted in large numbers of older and disabled people in care homes, supported living and family homes being re-categorized as ‘detained’.
Placing this ruling in its social, historical and global context, this book presents a socio-legal analysis of social care detention in the post-carceral era. Drawing from disability rights law and the meanings of ‘home’ and ‘institution’ it proposes solutions to the Cheshire West ruling’s paradoxical implications.
Marriage law in England and Wales is a historical relic which reflects a bygone age.
Successive governments have made a series of progressive but ad hoc reforms, most notably the introduction of civil partnerships and same-sex marriage. However, this has resulted in a legal framework which is complex and controversial, especially in relation to religion.
This book provides the first accessible guide to how contemporary marriage law interacts with religion and identifies pressure points in relation to non-religious organisations and unregistered religious marriages. It reveals the need for the consolidation, modernisation and reform of marriage law and sets out proposals for how the transformation of these laws can be achieved.
Approved Mental Health Professionals are specialist professionals authorised to make ethically complex and difficult decisions on the behalf of people with severe mental health difficulties. In this complex and challenging role, AMHPs must possess and deploy a range of skills, knowledge and values. This invaluable handbook considers these challenges and provides in-depth guidance on all key aspects of the role, including:
• working with mental health law;
• risks and challenges in a Mental Health Act assessment;
• staying safe as an AMHP;
• resilience as a trainee and practitioner.
Packed with helpful features such as illustrations, chapter summaries, discussion questions and further reading lists, this clear and concise book will be invaluable to students on AMHP and Best Interests Assessor programmes, as well as for professionals in the field.
Cohabiting couples and those entering religious-only marriages all too often end up with inadequate legal protection when the relationship ends. Yet, despite this shared experience, the linkages and overlaps between these two groups have largely been ignored in the legal literature.
Based on wide-ranging empirical studies, this timely book brings together scholars working in both areas to explore the complexities of the law, the different ways in which individuals experience and navigate the existing legal framework and the potential solutions for reform.
Illuminating pressing implications for social policy, this is an invaluable resource for policy makers, practitioners, researchers and students of family law.
Understanding Brexit provides a concise introduction to the past, present and future of one of the most important and controversial topics in modern British politics. Written for both those familiar with the topic and those new to it, the book sets out in a clear and accessible way many of the fundamentals for understanding why Britain voted to leave the European Union and what happens next.
As the COVID-19 pandemic has unfolded, stark social inequalities have increasingly been revealed and, in many cases, been exacerbated by the global health crisis.
This book explores these inequalities, identifying three thematic strands: power and governance, gender, and marginalised communities. By examining these three themes in relation to the effects of the pandemic, the book uncovers how unequal the pandemic truly is. It brings together invaluable insights from a range of international scholars across multiple disciplines to critically analyse how these inequalities have played out in the context of COVID-19 as a first step towards achieving social justice.
In recent years, the United Kingdom's Home Office has started using automated systems to make immigration decisions. These systems promise faster, more accurate, and cheaper decision-making, but in practice they have exposed people to distress, disruption, and even deportation.
This book identifies a pattern of risky experimentation with automated systems in the Home Office. It analyses three recent case studies including: a voice recognition system used to detect fraud in English-language testing; an algorithm for identifying ‘risky’ visa applications; and automated decision-making in the EU Settlement Scheme.
The book argues that a precautionary approach is essential to ensure that society benefits from government automation without exposing individuals to unacceptable risks.
The decision to mount an armed foreign intervention is one of the most consequential that a US president can take. This book sets out to explain why and when presidents choose to use force.
The book examines decisions to use force throughout the post-Cold War period, via flashpoints including the Balkans, the ‘War on Terror’ and the Middle East. It develops new explanations for variation in the use of force in US foreign policy by theorizing and demonstrating the effects of the displacement and repression of ideas within and across different US presidential administrations, from George H.W. Bush to Donald Trump.
For students, scholars and anyone with an interest in international relations and global security, this book is an original perspective on a defining issue of recent decades.
