Dementia: Health Services

To strengthen both local and national insight into dementia care, enable clearer benchmarking, and support the delivery of more timely, targeted, and person-centred support, NHS England continues to monitor the monthly dementia diagnosis rate and analyse trends at national, regional, and integrated care board level. The commitment to recover diagnosis rates to the national ambition, of 66.7%, remains in place, ensuring identification and appropriate support for people living with dementia.

The national ambition to ensure that two-thirds of people estimated to have dementia receive a formal diagnosis includes ensuring provision of a validated diagnosis of dementia subtype.

In addition, NHS England is actively looking to improve the clinical utility and relevance of dementia data reporting. This includes:

• enhancing primary care reporting through ongoing refinement of indicators and coding approaches. Notably, a new measure was introduced in April 2025 capturing the number of people with dementia who have experienced delirium in the past 12 months. This will support systems and providers to better understand variation in care provision, improve risk stratification, and strengthen care planning; and
• exploring improvements in the Mental Health Services Data Set to ensure activity within Memory Assessment Services is more fully reflected in available data. Work is underway with the NHS England analyst team to scope options for developing more meaningful coverage and consistency in memory service reporting.