Dementia Services (Gloucestershire)

Debate between Rebecca Harris and Richard Graham

Tuesday 22nd January 2013 Westminster Hall

[Richard Graham]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. I know his constituency well, and I am sure that there are points on which we could exchange information. My hon. Friend the Minister will have heard and noted his comment: it is probably a subject for a separate debate, and we may come back to that issue another day.

Secondly, I want to talk about diagnosis. Currently, less than half of people with dementia in England are formally diagnosed with the disease, even as dementia affects more of us. Gloucestershire is the county with the highest number of people with dementia in the south-west, and it has one of the highest diagnosis rates in the region. However, although the number of people diagnosed with dementia in Gloucestershire rose by 12% last year, to 4,037, another 4,800 people in the county are thought to have the condition but have not yet been diagnosed. Consequently, although the diagnosis rate of our primary care trust is good regionally, at 46%, one can see that we have a long way to go in absolute terms, especially if the county council is right that our population of people over the age of 75 will increase by 30% by 2022.

Where is the best practice currently in the country? Could my hon. Friend the Minister tell us from whom we can learn best how to drive up diagnosis rates within tight budgets? As the Alzheimer’s Society says, low-ish diagnosis rates prevent sufferers from accessing support and medical treatments that can help them to live better with the condition.

The third area is care. In the main debate in the House a fortnight ago, other Members spoke about the link between dementia and care, and about the growing need for a “fair” solution to the problem of caring for an ageing population. Again, it falls to our generation to resolve this situation. Across the country, the number of people over the age of 65 is set to double during the next 20 years, and in counties such as mine the rate of growth will be worse, and faster.

I know that, in the wake of the Dilnot commission’s proposals, the Government will make formal proposals shortly about how they believe this issue can be settled. I wonder if my hon. Friend the Minister can say anything today about whether dementia will have a part in that process, and whether it will perhaps encourage the speed of implementation of the plans that the Government are considering.

At the same time, will my hon. Friend the Minister join me in congratulating Gloucestershire county council for entirely ring-fencing its budget on adult social care during these difficult years of local government spending freezes? In the last debate in the House on dementia, we heard from several Members whose authorities were not doing that, and it would be interesting to know how many other authorities are doing the right thing for the most vulnerable—a group that definitely includes dementia sufferers—as Gloucestershire has been doing.

I have promised to mention two local initiatives on dementia, as I believe they show that Gloucestershire may be leading the way. First, I pay tribute to the development in Gloucestershire of the community dementia nurse, or CDN, service, which was launched in December 2011 by the 2gether NHS Foundation Trust. The CDN service provides specialist and direct dementia support to GPs, with each surgery in the county being allocated such a nurse.

Secondly, we are fortunate to have a local charitable foundation, the Barnwood Trust, and it is working closely with the Gloucestershire clinical commissioning group, which has won £500,000 from the NHS dementia challenge to create dementia-friendly communities. That means having community workers who are trained as dementia link workers—people who are connecting to local communities.

[Rebecca Harris (Castle Point) (Con)]

On that point, does my hon. Friend agree that it is quite often the local voluntary community groups such as the Mickey Payne Memorial Foundation, which was set up by my constituent Caroline Dearson, that are leading the way in spreading best practice, support networks and awareness within their communities?

[Richard Graham]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Community groups, such as the one in her constituency that she has mentioned and championed, are exactly the groups of people that are driving forward best practice at the local level. Of course, if they are able to win funds from the NHS dementia challenge then so much the better, because those funds would enable them to spread their good deeds further.

In Gloucestershire, we also benefit from local charities. The Guideposts Trust’s dementia web for Gloucestershire is a web-based support site that provides information for people with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. We also have two very good-value day centres, one run by Age UK Gloucestershire and the other by Gloucester Charities Trust. They enable people to stay in their own homes for longer, while at the same time enabling them to meet friends and access general facilities, and enabling their carers or loved ones to leave them safely for a couple of hours while they go shopping.

Lastly, there is a very helpful purple butterfly recognition scheme for dementia sufferers that the Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has introduced in both its hospitals, Gloucestershire royal hospital and Cheltenham general hospital. Therefore my constituents are benefiting all round from an increasing range of services and ways of managing and dealing with dementia better.

However, that is not to say—as my hon. Friend the Minister will understand—that all is perfect, or that we are necessarily doing all the best things that can be done. The important thing is that the barriers are down. All of us can talk openly, in my county and across the country, about dementia. There is no stigma and no shame, just shared sadness and sometimes that surprising strength that I alluded to earlier.

I am sure there are other things being done elsewhere that I would like to know more about and that my constituents would benefit from. So I would be grateful today if my hon. Friend the Minister could do a favour to us all—I mean all parliamentarians—by giving some ideas of the best practice that he has noticed in different ways of handling the disease and managing the suffering that goes with it. Even if he cannot do so comprehensively today, perhaps he can do so later by letter.

Sometimes, too, our own cities and towns need to widen our eyes, stretch out beyond us and allow us to see ideas from further afield that we can bring back, and the Minister can help to steer us. What role, for example, is there for faith groups? Who is doing the best work across different ethnic minorities? Are there particular extra sensitivities, such as elderly immigrants reverting to the languages of their youth, of which we need to be more aware? What more can be done to support GP surgeries in diagnosing dementia? How can people be enabled to stay in their own homes for longer without that feeling of helplessness if something goes wrong?

Finally, like all good pitches must, this speech ends with an invitation for the Minister to visit Gloucestershire to see what is happening; to meet the Barnwood Trust and hear its ambitions and vision for what it might be able to do; and to share with us what he likes, what he has seen across the country and what we can perhaps do more of. I would be delighted if the Minister can accept my invitation, because dementia matters very much to all of us in Gloucestershire, as it does to him, and we want to continue being adventurous by pushing the boat out and actively considering new ways to help people living with this ghastly disease and their families, who are so intimately affected by all elements of it. As I said at the start, we never know what we can do until we have to do it, and we must do it.