Nobody wants a person waiting unreasonably for a correct diagnosis of dementia. This discussion is NOT about that. The now infamous odious scheme from NHS England was designed to give GP surgeries £55 for every patient on their list who has been diagnosed with dementia in the six months up to next March, as part […]
Dr Sharma and I will be hosting a communication skills session for final year medical students on Sunday. We intend to use the following mock scenario on disclosing a diagnosis of dementia. The aim of this session is to discuss how communication skills are assessed in medical examinations. This is the actual example scenario […]
“Dementia Friends” is an initiative from the Alzheimer’s Society and Public Health England. In this series of blogpost, I take an independent look at each of the five core messages of “Dementia Friends” and I try to explain why they are extremely important for raising public awareness of the dementias. There’s more to […]
If a surgery appointment is booked for someone over 65, a ‘participating GP’, might be incentivised to ask about memory problems in a patient at risk of dementia due to heart disease, stroke or diabetes. There is a concern that some people are missing out on a timely diagnosis of dementia. It is claimed that some […]
I have always understood “living with dementia” to mean that that person carries on with life, knowing that there is an underlying medical phenomenon somewhere. To me, it’s exactly the same as living in recovery from alcohol dependence. If I were to have another alcoholic drink, I wouldn’t be able to stop drinking. It’s a […]
I have a foot in both research camps. I believe in good quality research about the ‘medicine’ of dementia. In the world of research, I am known to have contributed an original paper in the diagnosis of the frontal-variant of frontotemporal dementia. This paper explained why people with a dementia could even end up having […]
My presumption is that I wish to be extremely positive about HM Government’s own volition about leading the G8 with the subject of dementia. Also, the “Prime Minister’s Dementia Challenge”, which sets out a roadmap for dementia for this year and next, has been a success which I much admire. David Cameron and Jeremy Hunt, […]
Would I want to know if I had a dementia? The background to this is that I am approaching 40. For the purposes of my response, I’m pretending that I didn’t study it for finals at Cambridge, nor learn about it during my undergraduate postgraduate training/jobs, nor having written papers on it, nor having written […]
Living better with dementia 