Tag Archives: dementia

While our pensioners are living in poverty, should we really be sending more money abroad?

January 16, 2013   Alzheimer’s, Carers, charities, dementia, Older care

Funding the care for our vulnerable elderly is an issue of morality, not charity, writes Tracey Crouch

By Tracey Crouch

1:49PM GMT 15 Jan 2013

Last week, Parliament spent a full afternoon debating the extremely important issue of dementia. Colleagues from across the House spoke with real passion and emotion, sometimes based on personal experience, about a dreadful condition which in just a few years time will affect over a million people, or one in three of those aged over 65.

Most people will already know someone who has dementia or who will suffer from dementia in the future, and so how politicians deal with our ageing population and all the related issues that it brings is a real life electoral issue. People judge a government on its morality, and what can be more important than how we treat our vulnerable elderly?

It breaks my heart to hear about those in their retirement living in poverty. The Government has done the right thing to introduce the triple lock into pension increases, maintain the commitment to the winter fuel allowance and continue with cold weather payments. But with adult social care budgets being cut and a care funding crisis looming, so much more needs to be done, and it is time we recalibrated our spending priorities to ensure that taxpayers money, stretched as it is, goes into providing the services we need at home, not financing projects abroad.

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Uneven dementia care 'disgraceful'

January 15, 2013   Carers, dementia

15 January 2013 Last updated at 08:33

Uneven dementia care ‘disgraceful’

By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News

Uneven pattern of dementia diagnosis across UK – says charity

There is a “disgraceful” variation in the number of proportion with dementia being diagnosed across the UK, according to the Alzheimer’s Society.

About 800,000 people in the UK have some form of dementia, but most have not been diagnosed.

Estimates by the charity suggest 32% were diagnosed in the East Riding of Yorkshire compared with 76% in Belfast.

The government said the variation was “unacceptable” and caused “unnecessary suffering”.

Predicted levels of dementia across the UK were compared with data from GPs on the actual number of patients being diagnosed.

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Let’s make dementia a word and not a sentence

January 15, 2013   Alzheimer’s, Carers, dementia

Attitudes towards dementia need to change just as they have done towards cancer – but more swiftly, writes Jeremy Hunt.

That only 46 per cent of the country’s 800,000 dementia sufferers has received a formal diagnosis is ‘shocking’, says Jeremy Hunt. Photo: Eddie Mulholland for the Telegraph

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.

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