Practice of Competence Assessment in Dementia: Spain

Abstract

In Spain the issues dealing with competence and incompetence proceedings are essentially regulated by the Código Civil (Spanish Civil Code) and the Ley de Enjuiciamiento Civil (Spanish Rules of Civil Law Procedure), as well as by the Código Penal (Spanish Penal Code), regarding matters pertaining to the special protection of the incompetent as a victim. As to Informed Consent, whether in the case of diagnostic tests and interventions or their involvement in research or teaching projects, the basic regulation (pertaining to patients) is the Ley de Autonomia del paciente y del derecho al acceso a la información y documentación clínica (2000) (Spanish Law on the Autonomy of Patients and their Right to Access to Information and Clinical Documentation), which includes the contents of the Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine (Oviedo, 1997), which became mandatory in Spain by parliamentary agreement in 2000. We should not forget, however, that in geriatric psychiatry it is not uncommon to find situations in which legal regulations are lacking, however, a decision still has to be made; in this situation the clinician has to draw in bioethics (Calcedo-Barba et al., 2002).