Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the changes in the level of anti-psychotic medication prescriptions in dementia care in recent periods of covid-19 lockdown; and if he will make a statement.
NHS Digital publishes monthly data on the prescribing of anti-psychotic medication for people diagnosed with dementia. The number of people with a diagnosis of dementia that also had a prescription for an anti-psychotic medication was 42,942 in February 2021 or 10% of those on the Dementia Register. The trend has been stable over the last 12 months. The data does not include information on the level of doses of the medication prescribed.
NHS England and NHS Improvement continue to monitor the NHS Digital data and take steps to understand the patterns in prescribing and potential reasons for trends being seen.