[Skip to content]

.

Dementia

As our population ages, more and more people are being diagnosed and living with dementia.  

At the moment, too many people are being diagnosed late into the condition, limiting the range of help they can be given and cutting short the time they would be able to live as independently as possible.  Too many people with dementia are treated by general clinicians in general care settings rather than in specialist centres by experts in this field.

We need to reorganise the way we provide dementia care and work better with social services to support patients and their families have the best quality of life for as long as possible.  We are doing this by:

  • Increasing early diagnosis and intervention.

  • Increasing community services to support people to stay at home longer.

  • Increasing the skills and quantity of workforce focused on dementia care.

  • Improving the support available to carers.

  • Increasing psychiatric liaison provision to general hospitals and care homes.

  • Reducing avoidable admissions and time spent in general hospital beds, mental health beds and care homes.

 

Specific strands of work to support the improvement of dementia diagnosis and treatment are listed below. Just click on the tabs for more information.

Each health and social care community across the East Midlands participated in a series of workshops in conjunction with the Care Services Efficiency Delivery (CSED) programme and the regional team. Health and social care partners, people living with dementia and their carers, third and private sector participated in a process of mapping and analysing current services, reviewing cost and activity, developing new care and support pathways and prioritising areas for service improvement.

Action Plans

Integrated Care and Support Plans

The first East Midlands regional summit took place on 1 October 2009. A range of stakeholders, from health, social care, private and voluntary sector and people living with dementia and their carers, worked together to develop a vision for change, based on what people living with dementia and their carers want.

A follow up summit took place on 30 September 2010, which engaged a wider audience. This summit focused on taking forward a range of priorities:

  • Developing memory services

  • Improving care in acute hospitals

  • Reducing the use of anti-psychotic medication

  • Improving care in care homes

 

Stakeholders produced standards that they would want to see across the region in the priority areas, which were developed in to a Dementia Charter for the East Midlands.

The Joint Improvement Partnership commissioned the East Midlands Public Health Observatory to produce a data profile for 2008/09 predicting future demand up to 2025. As well as data directly concerning dementia, other information regarding the population within the East Midlands has been included in these profiles in order to help understand the socio-demographic characteristics, health status of the population and current services.

In addition to the data profile, all health and social care partnerships completed a diagnostic screening tool, which was devised using the 17 objectives in the national strategy. A regional report is available below with a summary of the key findings.

Symmetric was commissioned by the East Midlands Development Centre and partners to develop a System Dynamics model focusing on dementia. The aim was to produce a virtual whole system model that commissioners could use to test out commissioning decisions prior to implementation.

The Health and Social Care Dementia model is a computer simulation, originally developed by Symmetric SD for NHS East Midlands, that shows the impact of a range of service interventions (such as memory services, care home support, services to support carers) on the growing population of "older people living with dementia".

It can represent a range of population sizes, but mostly should be used at PCT / commissioning body level.

It is free to use and runs on iseeRuntime software. To get access to the model, contact Douglas McKelvie on:

Tel: 0131 557 0556; email: douglas.mckelvie@symmetricsd.co.uk

The model provides a strategic view of a whole population. It will be of interest to a wide range of practitioners, planners and managers who are concerned with any aspect of commissioning health or social care services, as well as public health specialists or analysts, and those involved in education, training and research.

Other local health economies are able to build on this model, for example by adding in specific services / interventions, provided that they make the updated model freely available.

Below is the final Symmetric report.

The NHS Institute has launched a Call to Action around antipsychotic drugs. find out more here.

Being in hospital is a very difficult experience of a person with dementia. Hospital environments can be disorientating and make the person with dementia seem more confused than normal. But there are things we can do to make a person's stay in hospital less stressful.

The resource pack below was developed in conjunction with University Hospitals of Leicester and the Regional Clinical Forum. It provides practical information for staff caring for people living with dementia to help understand some of the particular needs of people with dementia and their carers.

Under development

During the dementia workstream programme all localities have reviewed memory assessment and early intervention services. The examples below show case initiative that have been taken forward across the region as a result of this work.

long term conditions image2

Other useful links:

Putting People First

Dementia UK

Alzheimer's Society

National Institute for Health Research dementia programme

East Midlands Development Centre

Commissioning Services for People with Dementia