AGNI Explained, Episode 3: What Should Organisations Do Now?
Date: 15th September, 2026.
Authored by: Hannah Qaisir | hannah@sheridanconsult.co.uk
AGNI Explained closes with the question every organisation has been waiting for: now that we understand the test, and know how to apply it to a case, what should organisations actually do?
Summary
Episode 1 covered what changed since the Supreme Court's AGNI decision, moving deprivation of liberty away from the old Cheshire West "acid test." Episode 2 set out the three questions every reviewing team should ask when applying that test to a real case: the person's actual situation, their wishes and feelings, and whether everything considered together amounts to a deprivation of liberty. In this final episode, Hannah Qaisir turns from the individual case to organisational practice, setting out three steps.
Step one is review. This starts with the existing caseload, worked through an AGNI review rather than left as it stood under the old test. That review follows a clear path: from the person's concrete situation, through the relevant factors considered together, as set out in Episode 2, to a documented review outcome. The point isn't to reopen every case from scratch. It's to work through the caseload deliberately, case by case, under the new framework.
Step two is deciding. Every review has to land somewhere, and the episode is explicit about what that landing point needs to look like: reasoned, evidenced, documented and defensible. From the AGNI review, three outcomes are possible. Some cases will need authorisation through the court route. Others will need further evidence or specialist advice before a position can be reached. And some will support a defensible position that doesn't require the court at all. Which route a case takes matters less than whether the reasoning behind it would hold up if someone asked to see it.
Step three is embedding. This is where the episode pushes past the individual case entirely. AGNI isn't treated as a one-off backlog exercise to clear and move on from. It has to become part of how the organisation actually operates, reflected in training, documentation, quality assurance, escalation routes and governance. The episode frames these five elements as sitting around one constant centre: AGNI person-centred practice, an ongoing discipline rather than a checklist that gets completed once and filed away.
The episode closes by drawing the three steps together, review, decide, embed, into a single line that runs through all of them: keeping the person at the centre of every decision. That's the thread connecting all three episodes of AGNI Explained, from understanding what changed, to applying it in a real case, to building it into how an organisation works day to day.
Watch full episode above.