King’s Speech

Baroness Greenfield Excerpts

Friday 19th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Greenfield (CB)]

My Lords, as a neuroscientist I welcome consideration of mental health in the gracious Speech. I declare an interest as founder and CEO of a biotech company, Neuro-Bio Ltd, where we are striving towards a novel and effective treatment for Alzheimer’s disease. I was therefore sadly disappointed that no measure was made in the gracious Speech of the urgent issues relating to such a devastating health problem.

Why must the Government make dementia a priority? Almost 1 million people are living with the condition in the UK, and we expect this to rise to 1.4 million by 2040, due to our ageing population. Dementia costs the UK £42 billion a year, rising to more than £90 billion by 2040. One in three people born today will develop dementia, and it is a leading cause of death.

As things stand, dementia presents us with three broad challenges. The first is social care, an issue that many noble Lords have already touched on as a clear omission in the gracious Speech. Seventy per cent of residents in older-age care homes in England have dementia, while only 45% of care staff are currently recorded as having any level of appropriate training, so what could be the solution? A long-term workforce strategy: social care staff should be required to undertake dementia training, mapped to the Dementia Training Standards Framework or equivalent.

Secondly, there should be a sustainable funding model for quality personalised care, which pools the risk of care costs and is centred on achieving affordable care for everyone living with dementia.

The next challenge is diagnosis. More than one in three people living with dementia in England are currently undiagnosed. There is a significant regional variation in diagnosis rates, moreover, by more than 40%. What could be the solution? A target for a more ambitious dementia diagnosis rate should be a government priority. Secondly, there should be a commitment to better training for healthcare professionals. Thirdly, there should be funding for public awareness campaigns. Fourthly, there should be increasing quality and quantity of diagnosis, data collection and publication.

The final challenge is treatment. There are drugs that, for the first time, can slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease in the earliest stages of diagnosis. Tens of thousands of UK citizens could potentially benefit from these drugs if they were approved. However, the healthcare system is not yet ready to deliver such treatments, due to the lack of early diagnosis and specialist diagnostics. What could be the solution? First, a satisfactory plan should be developed by NHS England and the Department for Health and Social Care to be thoroughly prepared and ready to start to deliver these new treatments for dementia. Secondly, the current drugs being assessed are just the beginning. Though welcome, they do not halt the neurodegeneration process; they only slow it down. However, there is the very real prospect—still at the research stage, admittedly—of innovative treatments that could do far more and be much more effective, perhaps even halting cell death altogether. The biggest barrier to progressing such game-changing therapy at pace is, quite simply and inevitably, inadequate funding.

To conclude, dementia is the biggest unmet clinical need of our time and, as such, it surely should have been a high priority in government plans in the gracious Speech. While diseases such as cancer are serious, often disabling and frequently terminal, you can still reminisce over old photographs and still spend meaningful and precious time with your grandchildren. These life-enhancing moments are gradually closed off for an individual with dementia, and it is a spectre that haunts us all. We need to invest funds immediately in rising to the three challenges of social care, diagnosis and, above all, innovative and effective treatment, so that we could finally offer, perhaps, the prospect of our grandchildren one day asking, as we did in the past for smallpox and polio, “Was Alzheimer’s ever a problem?”