NHS dementia strategy criticised by mental health charity

Alzheimer’s Society says lack of planning by primary care trusts has created a ‘dementia postcode lottery’

One-third of health trusts do not have plans in place to implement the flagship national dementia strategy aimed at cutting unnecessary hospital admissions and premature entry into residential care, a leading charity claims today.

The Alzheimer’s Society says that despite the deadline for implementing the strategy having passed in March the lack of “joined-up” thinking between health and social care has led to a “dementia postcode lottery”.

It says that a survey of primary care trusts by the GP newspaper using freedom of information requests found one-third of the respondents did not have any plans in place with local authorities.

Almost half of the trusts could not account for how or if strategy money had been spent. The newspaper canvassed three-quarters of all NHS primary care trusts.

The strategy was implemented in response to a growing tide of criticism that not enough was being done for the 750,000 dementia sufferers in the country – more than half of whom have Alzheimer’s disease. Its goals included providing early diagnosis and support for everyone with dementia, delaying entry into residential care, improving information for users and carers and enhancing the quality of care in hospitals and care homes.

The Department of Health has already spent £150m in the past two years on the strategy – with the bill for a decade’s worth of extra spending coming to £1.9bn.

Andrew Chidgey, head of policy and public affairs at the Alzheimer’s Society, pointed out that one in three people over the age of 65 will die with dementia and that the extra spending should be set against the £20bn dementia bill the NHS faces every year. “‘The only way the full galvanising force of the national dementia strategy can be realised is if it is effectively rolled out at a local level. Unfortunately, 18 months after the strategy was published, this is clearly not happening everywhere and people are at the mercy of a postcode lottery of care.”

Experts in the US have also begun to question whether Alzheimer’s will increasingly affect younger people as a lack of use of a key part of the brain has been linked to the disease. There has been extensive research demonstrating the connection between the size of the hippocampus and the degree to which people employ navigational skills.

Doctors worry that should the hippocampus begin to atrophy from a lack of use in navigation, the result could be a loss of memory and a growing long-term risk of dementia at an earlier age. The Alzheimer’s Society says it is trialling brain training exercises to test this theory.