Tag Archives: alzheimers
Let’s make dementia a word and not a sentence
Attitudes towards dementia need to change just as they have done towards cancer – but more swiftly, writes Jeremy Hunt.
By Jeremy Hunt, Health Secretary
12:01AM GMT 15 Jan 201
For much of the last century, it was cancer: a word whose very mention would strike fear and dread.
Before the 1970s, treatment was rudimentary, prognosis was bleak and the stigma attached to the condition was rife.
Today, a similar cloud hangs over dementia. With cases expected to hit one million within two years, and doubling within a generation, we need the same progress as with cancer. The difference is that if we are to make the NHS sustainable with an ageing population, we don’t have 50 years to sort it out.
How do we do it?
As today’s Alzheimer’s Society research shows, we must start with better access to, and attitudes towards, early diagnosis.
Great grandmother, 100, died ‘because of carers’ poor English’
A 100-year-old woman died from a fractured skull after falling from a sling because there was a “language barrier” with her foreign nurses, an inquest heard.
By Hayley Dixon
3:51PM GMT 09 Jan 2013
Great-grandmother May Lavinia Ward was “full of life” until she fell a metre and a half from a bucket sling as she was moved from a chair to a bed, fracturing her skull, and hip and breaking her knee.
Carers Shasha Wei, from China, and Rumyana Ivanova, from Bulgaria, put the bloodied dementia patient back to bed for forty minutes after she had jerked forward onto the floor when one of them let her go.
Her agitation may have been caused because she couldn’t understand them, Hertfordshire Coroners Court heard today.
They had even changed her clothes but eventually a nurse at Meppershall Care Home, Bedfordshire, was informed and paramedics rushed to the scene to find Mrs Ward, who had a broken leg and swollen eye, vomiting dark blood.
Prime Minister’s Challenge on Dementia Hails Launch of New Website for the South of England
Media release
Thursday 3 January 2013
Prime Minister’s Challenge on Dementia Hails Launch of New Website for the South of England
A pioneering online public information service is today being launched across the South of England.
The ‘Our Health’ website is the first of its kind in England. It aims to transform the way that patients, their carers and health professionals access and share the latest information on a range of key local health and care services across the South.
The Our Health website was developed in the South West, initially providing information on local stroke and dementia services.
The website received the Prime Minister’s backing in March 2012, when David Cameron launched his ‘Challenge on Dementia’ and set out the need to promote local information on dementia services.
