Comments on: Doing a debate tomorrow

By: baronessmurphy

baronessmurphy — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 14:04:48 +0000

Thanks Everyone for your comments. The debate seemd to go well and the response from the minister Baroness Thornton gave me some optimism.

StephenPaterson, The galantamine (daffodil)story is interesting but it’s not looking quite as hopeful as it did. It does seem to help a little in slowing deterioration in a minority of people. I’m afraid it will be another 25 years or so before we have a really useful medication for dementia. But daffodils are one of my favourites too.

Claire (are you the Claire Hilton I know?), I’m never very keen on ring fencing of budgets for PCTs. They resent it because it doesn’t give them flexibility to prioritise for their locality and the ring fenced money often gets withdrawn again after the initiative has run for a while. Best get the money consolidated into the mainstream from the start.

By: stephenpaterson

stephenpaterson — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 12:44:44 +0000

Good luck indeed, Baroness Murphy. I left Lincolnshire some years ago to tend for my mother in her 80s through stages of vascular dementia, and it was hugely emotionally and physically draining process in which, amazingly, the wonderful help proferred from bodies like the Alzheimers Society had to be withdrawn as things progressed due to insurance risks to which the society could have been subjected.

Sadly too late for my mother, and desperately ironically, it seems an answer could have lain in the very daffodils in her garden here in Wales that she cherished so much:
http://www.newswales.co.uk/?section=Health&F=1&id=8160

By: claire hilton

claire hilton — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 19:19:28 +0000

Dear Elaine

You say ‘Wish me luck’. Well there are loads of your colleagues doing just that, experiencing the ongoing frustration of lack of resources. The lack of ringfencing for the Dementia Strategy money is a disgrace, as is the ‘Dementia Tax’. Thanks for taking the role you do.

Claire

By: Senex

Senex — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 13:01:16 +0000

Baroness you say:

“I am dispirited that after working all my professional life in this field I feel ashamed of the care we provide for older people afflicted by this catastrophe.”

Then its all the more reason to ring fence National Insurance contributions so that the Commons cannot use its above target revenues for general taxation purposes.

We need a constitutional instrument that prescribes human dignity.

Have you thought about explaining what the House of Lords does to school audiences? By way of a diversion it might be just the tonic you need.

By: James Clarke

James Clarke — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 01:42:04 +0000

Thankyou Baroness Murphy, for making the effort to actually read into this. It is a massive issue and currently the NHS is faltering and under massive pressure. We need to throw massive amounts of cash & research at this and we need to do it now. After all how can the NHS pay to keep 1 million people alive and cared for to a humane standard when the patient numbers are so great. We must be more forthright in our experiments and research! If we do not i fear we will be encouraging a very dangerous debate about aided suicide. This disease can be beaten but its victims take up far more resources than a cancer patient. We need to put our foot down and redirect important funding.