News

  • Skills for end-of-life care

    Providing end of life care requires specific skills and knowledge, so Skills for Care has partnered with Health Education England to create two learning pathways to help care workers learn what they need to know.  The aim is to ensure the workforce can deliver end of life care confidently and competently and the learning pathways…

  • Difficult conversations

    Admiral Nurse charity Dementia UK has published “Seven tips for handling difficult conversations” on its website, focusing on how to respond to differences of opinion among family members about how a loved with dementia should be cared for. Assembled with the help of Admiral Nurse Vic Lyons, the tips cover topics like preparing for the…

  • Spotlight on local priorities

    Registration is now open for the Alzheimer’s Society Annual Conference, which returns for 2023 during Dementia Action Week. The conference will put a spotlight on making dementia a priority locally, bringing together local leaders in dementia from across the UK to share best practice and challenges, and progress towards aims and ambitions in diagnosis and…

  • MP3 players and playlists

    Music charity Purple Angel as now notched up more than 3,250 personalised musical compilations, chosen by people with dementia themselves and sent out to them in care homes, hospitals and in their own homes.  Purple Angel founder Norrms McNamara said free MP3 players could be ordered through norrms@gmail.com and would include a customised selection of…

  • Diagnosis rates

    Dementia diagnosis rates have “stagnated” since the pandemic, Alzheimer’s Society has said, calling on people to contribute to a new parliamentary inquiry that seeks to find out what the barriers are to a diagnosis. The inquiry, by the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Dementia, will consider how diagnosis rates slumped to 62.5% in December, compared…

  • Major Conditions Strategy

    There have been mixed reactions across health and care to the government’s decision to scrap plans for individual conditions like dementia and replace them with a combined Major Conditions Strategy (see JDC Newsletter, 2 February). Last year the government promised 10-year plans for various individual conditions, including dementia, cancer and mental health, but in January…

  • Photo exhibition

    A new photographic exhibition intends to spark conversations about how society supports, respects and includes people who live with memory problems. Participants in the NIHR-funded APPLE-Tree dementia risk study, led by Queen Mary University of London and ILC-UK, collaborated with photographer and artist Sukey Parnell-Johnson to make and curate the public exhibition, at the Holy…

  • Ten-year plan?

    Alzheimer’s Society has called on the government to deliver on its dementia commitments after being told 25 times that the long-promised “ten-year plan for dementia” would appear “in due course”.  An open letter, signed by 36,000 members of the public, was delivered by Society ambassadors to 10 Downing Street demanding that the government make dementia…

  • Major Conditions Strategy

    Health secretary Steve Barclay held out the prospect of a government Major Conditions Strategy designed to tackle six health conditions including dementia. Barclay told the House of Commons that the policy would mark a shift to “integrated, whole-person care,” alleviating pressure on the health system, increasing healthy life expectancy and reducing health-related unemployment. The major…

  • Lifestyle and cognitive decline

    Adopting at least four healthy lifestyle habits can slow down cognitive decline, a large-scale China study has found. The China Cognition and Ageing Study, in a paper published in the BMJ, considered six healthy lifestyle factors and discovered that those who did one or none of them showed the fastest decline, while those who did…