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Learning difficulties charity Mencap has welcomed the General Medical Council's proposed guidelines for doctors about withholding or withdrawing a patient's life-prolonging treatment.

The draft guidelines, which the GMC hope will be approved this week, "rightly explore some of the difficult considerations when making often distressing decisions on withholding medical treatment," Mencap says.

But head of campaigns, Richard Kramer has warned that the guidelines need to be accompanied by new legislation, if the rights of disabled people are to be safeguarded.

"Under the current legal framework it is unclear who has the right to make day-to-day decisions about health care or welfare on behalf of people who lack the capacity to make decisions independently," Kramer said.

"Mencap is campaigning for new legislation on mental capacity to ensure that families can challenge the decisions of doctors and that severely disabled adults receive appropriate care, medical treatment and protection," he added.

The GMC's draft guidelines claim that where adult patients lack capacity to decide for themselves, the doctor must take account of their wishes when making an assessment of the benefits, burdens, risks and acceptability of proposed treatment .

But where a patient's wishes are not known, it is the doctor's responsibility to decide what is in the patient's best interests. The guidance says this cannot be done without information about the patient, and people close to the patient are "best placed to know".

The guidelines also suggest that when a health team, doctor and those close to the patient reach different conclusions about the course of treatment "it is important to take time to try to reach a consensus about treatment and it may be appropriate to seek a second opinion, or other independent or informal review".

Where there are doubts about a patient's capacity to make a decision, the guidelines suggest a thorough assessment consulting relevant professional guidelines, where appropriate a second opinion and if there is still doubt, legal advice must be sought, which may include asking a court to determine capacity.