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Dementia strategy work programme and planned events

  • Last modified date:
    21 July 2008

The work programme is being led by Professor Sube Banerjee, Professor of Mental Health and Ageing at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, and Jenny Owen, Executive Director of Adults, Health and Community Wellbeing in Essex.

Neil Hunt, Chief Executive of the Alzheimer's Society, is chairing the programme's External Reference Group. The ERG consists of a main core group and three sub-groups who are responsible for examining issues under the three key themes of the strategy: raising awareness, early diagnosis and intervention and improving the quality of care. 

The process of developing the strategy will be not be confined to professionals but will be fully inclusive of people with dementia and their family carers - the ERG includes people with dementia and family carers and we will be involving people with dementia and carers in our stakeholder activity.

Review of the use of anti-psychotic drugs

On 19 June 2008, Health Minister Ivan Lewis outlined proposals to improve the quality of dementia care and provide more help for people with dementia, as he launched a consultation on the first ever National Dementia Strategy.

That announcement covered a number of immediate actions, as well as other proposals which will be consulted on over the coming months, including an immediate review into the prescribing and use of anti-psychotic drugs to treat sufferers of dementia. This review will be completed before the publication of the National Dementia Strategy in the autumn of 2008.

Communications activity / planned events

Our key messages, and the way in which we communicate them, will change as the project moves forward. Therefore, communications activity will be divided into three key phases:

Phase 1 – Raising awareness

 A number of events are planned to support this awareness-raising phase. These include:

 Listening events

The DH has asked the Care Services Improvement Partnership (CSIP) to lead an engagement and listening exercise in each region during January to March. This will feed directly into the development and implementation of the DH's Dementia Strategy that is due for publication in October 2008. The events are being arranged in partnership with the Alzheimer's Society

Training workshop
  
A key element of the strategy, which will span all three themes (raising awareness, early diagnosis and intervention and improving the quality of care) will be the training of all the staff groups involved, covering both health and social care. As a result we are planning to hold a training workshop with key players in the field to address what provision is currently made for training on dementia and what changes might be needed in the future. The workshop has been arranged for 26 February 2008.

Phase 2 – Pre-consultation and consultation period (May – end of August 2008)

Phase 3 – Post consultation period through to launch (September/October 2008)

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