Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment his Department has made of the effectiveness of support provided for people with dementia.

In the Dementia 2020 Challenge, we have set a broad vision for transforming dementia care and support in England by 2020.

In the accompanying Implementation Plan, which set out the actions the Department and its partners will take to ensure that the commitments in the Dementia 2020 Challenge are delivered, we set out specific actions to improve quality and levels of care. We are currently undertaking a review of the 2020 Challenge Implementation Plan to assess whether its actions have been achieved and establish what additional activity can be undertaken to ensure that the Dementia 2020 Challenge commitments are met as planned, so that England is recognised as the best country in the world for dementia care and support by 2020.

A key commitment in the Dementia 2020 Challenge was the development of effective metrics across the health and care system to track progress. To that end, the dementia profile, which has been developed by Public Health England’s Dementia Intelligence Network, provides access to local data and intelligence across the care pathway for benchmarking purposes and to enable localities to make sustainable improvements in services and outcomes.

To understand the experiences of people with dementia better, we have also established a Citizens’ Engagement Panel, which will be used to inform and improve the ongoing delivery of the Dementia 2020 Implementation Plan and to influence and improve the delivery of front-line dementia care services, to ensure they better meet the needs expressed by people with dementia and their carers.

The Economic and Social Research Council and National Institute for Health Research have issued a joint funding call for projects looking at dementia prevention, interventions and care delivery. Proposals have been invited for projects that will look at care delivery across all care settings and successful projects will inform health and social care practice and policy relating to dementia, supporting people in their communities and making a difference to the lives of people with dementia and their carers and families.