Luciana Berger’s appointment as minister for mental health with shadow cabinet rank and her commitment at the Progress meeting on dementia is the best hope yet of getting much-needed action to tackle this health timebomb.
Jeremy Hughes, Alzheimer Society chief executive, joined members of parliament Angela Rayner and Karin Smyth and Camden council cabinet member for health and adult social care Sally Gimson in setting out the challenges of providing services for the 800,000 people affected by the condition, and their carers.
And while they highlighted good practice in dementia care services in parts of the country, they also spelt out the need for:
- Integration between health and social services which both provide care for dementia patients;
- More funding for suitable housing and support services to enable dementia patients to stay in their own homes as long as possible;
- Speedier discharge from hospital for dementia patients;
- Recognition of the skills of carers with a proper career structure and better pay;
- Expansion of dementia care services, such as memory clinics, and continued efforts to bear down on inappropriate use of powerful medication.
The Tories put dementia on the global agenda with two meetings of the G8 nations on the subject last year. But cuts in social services and now the looming deficit in NHS budgets will make this little more than lip service. Nene clinical commissioning group in Northamptonshire, for example, has closed memory clinics and cut by a third the community psychiatric nurses who are the frontline in supporting dementia patients at home.
So for Luciana and her colleagues on the Treasury frontbench, there is the challenge of taking the Tories to task over broken promises to the millions caring for family members with dementia, especially as the NHS budget crisis bites later this autumn.
The panel agreed that the ideal was to enable people with dementia to remain at home as long as possible. Sally Gimson said care homes in her council area were closing in the switch to domiciliary services. Jeremy Hughes set out his organisation’s online support for carers, and also described the huge reductions achieved quite easily in prescriptions of anti-psychotic drugs for patients.
Angela Rayner described her former role as a care worker and Unison representative, providing quasi-medical care to people with complex needs and developing a career path for carers to get higher level qualifications.
But no one had an answer to the biggest challenge of funding dementia care, currently running at £2bn, and expected to rise to £50bn by 2038 when numbers affected by the disease are expected to reach 1.4 million.
This was a well-attended meeting chaired by Richard Angell, with a lot of people, myself included, drawing from their personal experience of caring for a family member with dementia. It is not the stuff of headlines, especially at a conference dominated by the politics of the leadership election. But as one of the most pressing social policy issues of our time, it is one that I hope Progress will keep on the boil.
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Sally Keeble is a former minister and former member of the Treasury select committee. She tweets @Sally_Keeble
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To see the Storify of this event, click here, and to listen again to the event, click here