Professor Cillian Twomey:

I am very grateful for that assurance, Chairman, because I still wondered. Some of the questions we ask about testing capacity are not very relevant. That comes together in the context of wills and testamentary capacity.

The issue of litigation is slightly outside this debate, but I agree that it could arise. In my view, collaborative practice mediation is an area of dealing with concerns that needs to be developed very strongly. These issues arise nearly always out of a communication deficit, and we should try to make ourselves more available for that. That is easily said but less easily delivered. In practice, I did rounds on three different wards every week, and at the end of each round I had a meeting with relatives, which is communicating. I was conscious of the importance and I explained things in plain language and so on. However, I got into the habit after a while of asking the person to whom I was talking if he or she could provide a synopsis of what he or she thought I had said. Sometimes I would be horrified as I thought I had not said that at all. That is bad enough, but then I would meet that person's sister next week and ask the same question, and then I would hear a different version of events. People do not hear half of what we say when we first meet them, and perhaps they do not understand half of what they have heard. That means we need to meet them repeatedly. That is time consuming but worthy of practice.