Tomorrow morning I have a main debate in the Chamber on the new National Dementia Strategy http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/Publicationsandstatistics/Publications/PublicationsPolicyAndGuidance/DH_094058
I’ve been finishing off my speech today…I will only get 15 minutes. It’s a truism that when you stop worrying about the kids, you start worrying about your parents and what you worry about is their minds failing. Given peers’ average age of 68, I can say with some confidence that one third of us will die with dementia. It’s us next. Dementia has a greater social and economic impact on families and Government in the UK than the whole of cardiovascular disease and cancer put together and its time we tackled the problems seriously.
There are well over half a million people with dementia in England and this will rise to nearer a million by 2025. The King’s Fund estimates that the cost of dementia in England to the NHS, local authorities and individuals will rise from £17 billion now to over £23 billion by 2018. And yet Government Investment in research is paltry, eight times less than in cancer for example and the delivery of care often shamefully poor. Terminally ill dementia sufferers have to purchase their own care in inadequately staffed care homes with poorly paid and poorly trained migrant staff who don’t speak colloquial English. Most patients are contributing over £300 per week. Compare that with the free care provided to cancer patients in the NHS; this is the profoundly inequitable; the Alzheimer Society call it the Dementia Tax.
The recently published National Dementia Strategy has the potential to be one of the Government’s triumphs. There is common agreement that if followed it’s a blueprint for transforming care. But there are few really effective community services out there at present, there just isn’t anything like adequate funding in Social Care and what is there is often poorly spent. The forthcoming green paper on adult social care (it’s rumoured to be coming out on 30 June) had better come up with some good solutions to the funding dilemma. I grew up witnessing the stressful impact of my grandmother’s mental decline on my own family. 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.
Do these debates make any difference? Probably their immediate impact is minimal. But over the years I’ve learned to work on the ‘drip, drip, drip ‘ principle to effect changes in this area. Wish me luck.
And here’s my new parliamentary photo for this year arrived from Dods today….
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.
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.
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
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
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.