Objectives

The seminar series aims to facilitate the founding of an interdisciplinary European research network investigating the legal, social and medical attitudes toward precedent autonomy within Europe and to developing a European strategy to enhance advance decision-making in all its forms. It seeks to promote and support high quality research and to encourage a more critical and constructive assessment of the law relating to advance decision-making within Europe, interlinking legal discourse with policy and practice discourses on aspects of mental health and mental incapacity law, promoting a multiperspective dialogue and analysis. It will bring together leading researchers, practitioners, PhD students and third sector workers from across Europe.

The series seeks:

(i) to develop our understandings of how advance decision-making operates, at a legal, healthcare professional and social level;

(ii) to inform implementation strategies to encourage uptake of advance decisions from people who would like to exercise prospective autonomy and to facilitate the drafting of advance decisions that reflect the author's intentions and are likely to be capable of implementation;

(iii) to consider ways in which the European Union may have a role to play in promoting European advance decisions, effective within the EEA.

(iv) to collaborate on the production of a special issue of a high-ranking journal addressing these issues.

The objectives above are central to achieving our ultimate aim of creating a European network with a view to submitting a bid for Horizon 2020 funding to consider the fit between legal, professional and user understandings of advance decision-making and enhance the ability of individuals to plan effectively for times of incapacity.