I’ll be blunt. It’s my dream for the #NHS to run a proactive not reactive service, promoting the whole person living well with dementia. The Australian jurisdiction have recently provided some helpful inroads here. The narrative has changed from one of incessantly referring to people living with dementia as a ‘burden’ on the rest of […]
“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 […]
OK it’s not heaven on earth – but Kentish Town London does have some merits I suppose. To say that I am passionate about the dementia policy in England is an understatement. Throwing forward, I believe living well with dementia is a crucial policy plank (here’s my article in ‘ETHOS journal’), for which service provision […]
Picture this. It’s a busy GP morning surgery in London. A patient in his 50s, newly diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, a condition which causes a progressive decline in structure and function of the brain, has a simple question off his GP. “Now that I know that I have Alzheimer’s disease, how best can I look […]
It’s not as if the NHS has never thought about innovation. In 2011, it published a report called “Innovation: health and wealth“. The barriers to innovation are well known. The report indeed provides a good synthesis of some of the more common barriers. Simon Stevens, as NHS England’s new CEO, in identifying private healthcare […]
I received this message last night. The thing is, I don’t buy into the profoundly negative imagery of the media, including memes such as “crippling”, “horrific”, “timebomb” and “explosion”. Whilst some people, and caregivers, are undeniably “suffering”, you can’t expect all people to agree with this particular narrative at all times, I feel. One of […]
We are continually being reminded that ‘money does not grown on trees’. Funds are said to be ‘unsustainable’. You’ve heard it all before. And yet there is potentially a scanty evidence base for certain initiatives in the NHS, where every penny does count. For every contract awarded, there’s an equal and opposite contract which has […]
The HE KSS/BSMS (Health Education Kent Surrey and Sussex / Brighton and Sussex Medical School) have launched the “Primary Care Dementia Fellowship Programme”. This is a programme for GPs, practice nurses and staff, and community nurses in Kent, Surrey and Sussex. (Health Education Kent Surrey and Sussex will provide the funding to release Fellows to […]
In case you don’t like the soundtrack, here are the slides. To some extent, Europe resolved our dispute about whether we should aspire to an ‘early diagnosis’, or ‘timely diagnosis’ for dementia. The overall consensus from the European ALCOVE project was that a diagnosis should be timely, in keeping with the needs of the person […]
Living better with dementia 