The Mental Health Act and the Adult Guardianship and Trusteeship Act: Working Together to Protect the Rights of Albertans
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Adult Guardianship and Trusteeship Act (AGTA) was proclaimed in force October 30, 2009, and replaced the 30-year-old Dependent Adults Act. (1) Proclamation of the recent amendments to the Mental Act (MHA) occurred in two phases--September 30, 2009, and January 1, 2010. (2) Both pieces of legislation are concerned with the rights and welfare of vulnerable adults, but the Acts vary in scope and focus. Changes to the MHA were considered as the AGTA was developed, so the two pieces of legislation are compatible. This article briefly outlines the general provisions regarding decision-making and some related issues under the two Acts. The AGTA is relevant to all adult Albertans. It speaks to an individual's ability to make personal and/or financial decisions according to the decisional demands of their life circumstances. The Act is grounded in guiding principles focused on a presumption of capacity, autonomy and best interests decision making, which includes consideration of the wishes, values and beliefs the adult held while capable. (3) It addresses situations where capacity may be an issue for a number of reasons (e.g., developmental delay, brain injury, dementia). The AGTA and accompanying regulations standardize the capacity assessment process and establish clear guidelines for capacity assessors under the Act. (4) Trustees act as substitute decision makers for financial matters. Supporters or substitute decision makers may provide assistance or decision making for a range of personal matters. Personal matters are divided into eight groupings (e.g., health, social activities, employment). (5) The Act reflects current knowledge on mental capacity and the different levels of ability people have for making decisions. In keeping with the guiding principle of a least intrusive approach to decision making assistance or authority, a substitute decision maker will only be granted authority in those areas where it is absolutely necessary (e.g., a guardian may be appointed to make health decisions, but the adult retains autonomy for all other decision making). The AGTA establishes innovative legal mechanisms so Albertans can get the level of decision making assistance appropriate to their needs. The decision making options under the AGTA are outlined below. Supported Decision Making Authorizations (SDMAs) allow capable adults to authorize someone they trust to help them with decisions. (6) The authorization allows the to access relevant information that might otherwise be protected under privacy laws. The supporter is also able to help the adult think through and communicate decisions. SDMAs will be useful for capable individuals with communication barriers (e.g. people whose first language is not English, people with mild disabilities). Co-decision Making Orders (CDMOs) allow adults assessed as significantly impaired to consent to a Court order appointing a trusted person(s) as their co-decision maker. (7) The order requires the adult to make all or certain personal decisions in partnership with their co-decision maker. This option may be appropriate when the adult has a strong, positive relationship with his/her co-decision maker (e.g., wife acting as a co-decision maker for her brain injured husband). The Public Guardian cannot be a co-decision maker. CDMOs are issued by the Court of Queen's Bench. Guardianship Orders appoint a guardian to make all or certain personal decisions on behalf of incapable adults, including decisions pertaining to health care. (8) Health care is broadly defined, and includes: any examination, diagnosis, procedure or treatment undertaken to prevent or manage any disease, illness, ailment or health condition; any procedure undertaken for the purpose of an examination or a diagnosis; any medical, surgical, obstetrical or dental treatment; anything done that is ancillary to any examination, diagnosis, procedure or treatment; any procedure undertaken for the purpose of preventing pregnancy, except sterilization that is not medically necessary to protect health; palliative care; and a treatment plan. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".