Tom Clonan (Independent)

Forgive me if this is a stupid question but, again, I am a layperson on the periphery of this. Are those who come to assess capacity professionally trained? Do they come from a particular professional background? We know more broadly as a committee the challenges with recruitment and retention across all the different clinical and professional grades. Notwithstanding the social model that should apply, flowing from the UNCRPD, are those people fully trained to assess a person? I am thinking of a situation I would be very familiar with where the young man has scanning or dysarthric speech and, as a consequence, people assume he has some kind of intellectual disability and they might not always give him the time to articulate what he wants to articulate. Could the witnesses speak to that in the brief time we have? Sorry for the long-winded question.