Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent assessment she has made of the potential impact of geographical disparities in access to specialist dementia diagnostics on the (a) accuracy and (b) timeliness of diagnoses across regions.

The Office for Health Improvement and Disparities’ Dementia Intelligence Network has been commissioned by NHS England to develop a resource to support investigation of the underlying variation in dementia diagnosis rates. The aim of this work is to provide context for variation and enable targeted investigation and provision of support at a local level, to enhance diagnosis rates. The tool has been released and is available via the NHS Futures Collaboration platform.