Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether his Department has plans to help increase dementia diagnosis rates to pre-Covid-19 levels in Leigh and Atherton constituency.

We are committed to recovering the dementia diagnosis rate (DDR) to the national ambition of 66.7%, which in England, at the end of February 2025, was 65.4%.

To support recovery of the DDR and implementation of the Dementia Care Pathway, we have developed a dashboard to provide appropriate data and enable targeted support where needed.

To reduce variation in diagnosis rates, the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities’ Dementia Intelligence Network has developed a tool for local systems, which includes an assessment of population characteristics such as rurality and socio-economic deprivation. This enables systems to investigate local variation in diagnosis and take informed action to enhance their diagnosis rates. The tool has been released and is available via the NHS Futures Collaboration platform.