Dementia

Sarah Newton Excerpts

Thursday 10th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Newton (Truro and Falmouth) (Con)]

I listened with great pleasure to my hon. Friend—I hope I can call her that—the hon. Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley); I have the privilege of serving as her deputy on the all-party group on social care. I wish to echo the point she has just made, which was also so well made by my hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tracey Crouch), who played such an important role in securing today’s debate.

This is a very important occasion for us to show the collective will of hon. Members—there are so many here today—to hold the Government’s feet, and indeed the Opposition’s feet, to the fire. We need urgently to come to an all-party agreement on how to fund properly the future of care and social care in our community. I also wish to thank the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) for her contribution. I am sure that she will indulge me as I thank the chair of the all-party group on dementia, Baroness Greengross, who has dedicated her whole life, both in the other place and outside Parliament, to raising issues affecting older people, their families and carers so well. I thank the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles for her part in securing this debate, which gives us such an important opportunity to de-stigmatise dementia and other mental illness.

I remember only too well that when I was a child growing up people would not talk about cancer; it was whispered about or called “the C word”. Thankfully, we can now openly talk about cancer, which is to the great benefit of sufferers, their families, their loved ones and their carers. We must quickly move to the same position for people suffering from dementia, Alzheimer’s and a range of other mental health conditions.

[Neil Parish]

I agree very much with my hon. Friend that cross-party support on how to provide long-term care for people with dementia is essential, because our population is ageing. Better medical care means that people are living longer, but of course it also means that we will have more people suffering from dementia. It is right that we accept that situation as being part of society and as something we must deal with, but we must have a way of providing the funding so that we do not take away everybody’s assets to pay for treating dementia.

[Sarah Newton]

My hon. Friend makes his point well. I know that other hon. Members have very worthwhile points to make, so I do not wish to take up too much of the limited time available. However, I wish to make just a few points about how we in Cornwall are rising to the Prime Minister’s dementia challenge. It is right for us to set strategies nationally and to agree nationally on the overall frameworks to tackle one of the greatest challenges of our century. However, it is also important to look for the solutions locally. We should set the strategies nationally but enable everybody in communities around the country to come together to find their solutions. As the right hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Burstow) rightly said in his opening remarks, we will all have to rise to the challenge. Every single part of society and every part of the public sector has its role to play. Indeed, as my hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford said, the private sector, including supermarkets and other organisations in the public domain, has an important role.

What have we done in Cornwall of which I am so proud and which I want to share with right hon. and hon. Members? Let us start with the NHS, because when people seek a diagnosis that is where they start off on their journey with dementia. We have set up the Kernow clinical commissioning group, which is very successful and has got off to a flying start. It has attracted a large sum from the dementia challenge—well over £500,000. What is it doing with that money? It is working very effectively in partnership with other parts of the public sector, voluntary organisations and other parts of the NHS to ensure that there is an integrated, joined-up approach in Cornwall.

The CCG has targeted an issue mentioned by many Members, which is the need to ensure that everybody working in health and social care is properly trained, from carers through to doctors and nurses in the acute sector, to ensure that they are aware of dementia and how to talk to and relate to the people with this condition with whom they come into contact, as well as their families, friends and informal carers. The group is also using the money to ensure, among other things, that from the moment of diagnosis of dementia through to the end of life, sadly, there is a named individual available for that person and their family and carers. Obviously, it is early days as it just got the funding in November, but its ambitions are very important and will make a real difference to the quality of life of families in Cornwall.

Another issue that has been mentioned today is the lack of care from some nurses in parts of the acute sector. I want to share with hon. Friends a great initiative in the Royal Cornwall hospital, which is our only acute hospital in Cornwall. The friends of the Royal Cornwall hospital, who have worked so well with nurses, doctors and managers over a long period, are addressing some of the issues raised today. They have a very good system of mealtime companions, specially trained volunteers who work alongside care assistants and nursing staff. When the staff are too busy, they provide the extra time, care, compassion and consideration that needs to be given to a range of patients, including those with dementia, to ensure that they have a drink and something to eat. The hospital is also open to family members and others at mealtimes. I recommend that hon. Friends take that issue up with their hospital trusts and use the example of Royal Cornwall, which has clearly found a way around the problem.

The voluntary sector and society as a whole will have a hugely important part to play. Like many other hon. Members who have spoken, I am involved with the memory café in my constituency, in Falmouth. There are 24 other memory cafés in Cornwall and they are really important. People with dementia and other memory loss conditions, their families and their carers can come along to a safe, supportive environment, have some fun and do some interesting activities, talk to each other and get information. That is very important.

In Cornwall, we are fundraising for Admiral nurses. Those Members who have Admiral nurses in their constituencies will know the very important work they do to support families in much the same way as Macmillan nurses support cancer patients and their families. Admiral nurses provide an invaluable service for people with dementia and I shall be working hard alongside those who are fundraising so that we soon, I hope, have Admiral nurses in Cornwall.

I could talk about a lot of things, but for the sake of brevity let me simply say that many of the activities I have mentioned must be co-ordinated and planned. I want to reassure my Opposition colleagues that that is possible. Our health and wellbeing board in Cornwall has got off to a really good start. It works very closely with public health providers and all the different parts of the community, from housing to environmental health, to pull together a strategy for dementia and turn the good ideas and aspirations into action. I see the reforms to the NHS giving a great deal of power to doctors, other health professionals and people across the public sector to come together to work in partnership to deliver local solutions that work for communities. Salford is quite different from Cornwall and we all need to work together to find what works in our communities.

A great deal of good work has been going on in Cornwall and will continue in years to come, but I am not complacent. We are a part of the country with a fast- ageing population and have yet to find ways to diagnose dementia accurately. We have some of the lowest levels of detection of dementia. I will work hard with colleagues in Cornwall in all sectors to drive that up.

[Hazel Blears]

Like the hon. Lady, I am keen to foster the sense of consensus and cross-party working on this essential issue, but the elephant in the room in this debate is the severe cuts that have had to be made to local authority social care over the past three years—nearly £1 million in Salford. I wonder how in her community in Cornwall, which will be facing similar issues, she is dealing with the impact of substantial cuts in day-to-day care.

[Sarah Newton]

I thank the right hon. Lady for that question, because it gives me a good opportunity to praise Cornwall council. Undoubtedly all local authorities are facing tough decisions as a result of having to make cuts. There have been no politics in this debate so I will not go on to say why we are faced with the mess and why we have to make those difficult decisions, which I am sure we would rather not have to make. Cornwall council has not cut at all its expenditure on adult social care.

It gives me great pride to be able to stand up here and publicly thank Cornwall council for that. It is making sure that every penny that it receives from the Government—every single penny of the extra money to integrate NHS services with Cornwall council’s adult social care service—and the entitlement money and the money for carers’ respite is being spent. The council is not cutting front-line services for the most vulnerable people. The current settlement coming from the Government is increasing the amount of money into Cornwall for further improving and integrating the quality of care between adult social care and the NHS.

Those of us who have been around this subject and who have been campaigning on it for years, which includes many of the Members in the Chamber, know that the future lies in joined-up, integrated services. It is not about throwing ever more millions of pounds at the problems. It is about being smarter and wiser and linking all those services around the patient, the carers and the families. That is what is going on in Cornwall.

To summarise, I am in no doubt about the challenges that we face and I am not at all complacent. We need to build on the very good momentum and leadership shown by the Prime Minister on the issue to ensure that every family and everyone suffering from the condition gets the best possible care from us.