Dementia affects an increasing number of people: in 2012, 800,000 people in the UK had a form of dementia. The cost to the British economy, estimated at £23bn a year by the Alzheimer’s Society, is now greater than cancer, strokes and heart disease combined. Finding a solution that can both alleviate the pressures on society and allow people with dementia to live with dignity is crucial; this is why it should win the public vote to decide the focus of the Longitude prize 2014.
Tag Archives: NHS
Technology could help people with dementia remain in their homes
Voting for dementia in the Longitude Prize could help revolutionise care
As well as the trumpet-playing kind, Toyota are experimenting with assistive robots.
A £10 charge to visit a GP would be just the start of a slippery slope for the NHS
We either let our NHS be trashed by the privatisers and cutters, or we defend a properly funded, publicly run, universal system that is free at the point of use
A GP with a patient. ‘This ideological assault is being accompanied by an actual attempt to dismantle and privatise the NHS.’ Photograph: David Sillitoe for the Guardian
A slow hand clap for Andy McGovern, a London hospital nurse who has proposed that the Royal College of Nursing supports a £10 charge to visit a GP. On its own terms, the proposal is an unacceptable assault on the very foundations of the NHS: that it is free at the point of use. But the suggestion is so menacing because of where it originates from. The many enemies of the NHS – who have to be diplomatic, knowing that the NHS “is the closest the English have to a religion”, as Nigel Lawson once put it – will rejoice. “Aha!” they will think. “Now even the nurses are debating NHS charges, we have been given the political cover we need!”
