Dementia: Diagnosis
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to ensure that patients with dementia living in (a) rural and (b) socio economically-deprived areas are diagnosed as quickly as those in other areas.
Answered by Stephen Kinnock
Given the level of inequalities known within dementia diagnosis, NHS England commissioned the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID) to develop a resource to support investigation of the underlying variation in dementia diagnosis rates.
The OHID’s Dementia Intelligence Network 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.
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