Philosophers at Essex are helping health and social care practitioners think through the incredibly difficult issues they face as they support people at the end of their lives.

• Find out more about the workshop on the Essex Autonomy Project website

The Autonomy at the End of Life – Practitioner Workshop on Tuesday 21 April will be led by Professor Wayne Martin, Director of the Essex Autonomy Project, and held at the University's Colchester Campus.

The free workshop is part of the University of Essex’s 50th anniversary events and coincides with a major conference being held later in the week at The Forum Southend-on-Sea on Thursday 23 April. The week is designed to highlight Essex’s important contributions to vital debates around personal autonomy.

The Essex Autonomy Project is an interdisciplinary team of philosophers and legal experts helping and supporting policymakers, care workers, medical practitioners and legal professionals. The team has been investigating the ideal of self-determination across a number of fields including health care, care for the elderly, social care and psychiatric care.

The Project has provided guidance and training on dealing with the complex issues surrounding mental competence, and the capacity of vulnerable individuals to make decisions for themselves.

The workshop will look at the history of the concept of autonomy and recent legal history. Participants will reflect on their own professional experiences and review challenging capacity assessment scenarios.

They will also be updated on recent research by the Maudsley Institute of Psychiatry and the Essex Autonomy Project on the factors that affect decision-making capacity in two challenging populations, people experiencing depression and individuals with neurocognitive deficit.

A major challenge for practitioners is risk assessment and one of the sessions will review existing practices around risk assessment and introduce some of the research in cognitive psychology around risk assessment and bias, which will provide a conceptual toolkit for identifying bias in risk assessment. The session will also offer some guidance on the presentation of information about risk in expert testimony for judicial and other formal proceedings.

There will also be the chance to review the controversial history of best-interests assessment in England and Wales, and consider how the 2013 Aintree decision in the UK Supreme Court has changed the landscape.

Professor Martin will explore the concepts of supported decision-making and decision-communities, and consider the controversial question as to whether there should be a hierarchy on the best-interests checklist in the Mental Capacity Act.