Care Services (Older People)

Debate between Tracey Crouch and Stephen Lloyd

Tuesday 7th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Lloyd]

I agree. My hon. Friend’s important intervention is relevant to one of the key issues with which I shall deal in my speech. Not only have the dementia figures risen hugely over the past few years—and they will clearly continue to rise—but there are still many tens of thousands of people with dementia throughout the UK for whom there is no provision whatsoever.

Let me put some of the figures into perspective. There are currently 750,000 people with dementia in the UK, and the number is set to rise to over 1 million in the next 15 years. One in three people in the UK over the age of 65 will die with dementia. People with dementia are significant users of both health and social care services. For example, people over 65 with dementia are currently using up to one quarter of hospital beds at any one time. That is an enormous problem.

[Tracey Crouch (Chatham and Aylesford) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this important debate. We have served together for some time now on the all-party group on dementia, and we have spoken on many occasions about the impact of dementia patients on primary health care. Does he agree that one way of addressing the problems of dementia patients receiving care in hospitals is by making sure that the professionals on the wards have mandatory training?

[Stephen Lloyd]

That is an important point. My partner is a community matron, and a wee while ago I made a rather foolish comment by asking why, with all the skills she and her colleagues have, they do not cover dementia as well. She gave me very short shrift, and emphasised, in her splendid way, “Stephen, dementia care is a very specific need. We all need more and better training on it, and also, to be honest, we need more specialist dementia nurses.” I certainly agree that it is essential that there is training for all professionals dealing with dementia.

The exponential growth of this debilitating condition is a result of the growing age profile. Today, we are dying in our 80s. That is a good thing of course, as many older people lead full and productive lives, but it also brings its own set of challenges, one of which is that one in six people over the age of 80 suffer from dementia.

I am grateful that the coalition Government have stated their commitment to the national dementia strategy. I have had meetings on this issue with the Minister, so I am also grateful that he is present this evening. I also congratulate the Government on revising the implementation plan. Under this revised plan, dementia will be a major priority for the coalition, which I welcome, but I also look forward to hearing some of the specific detail.

I remain very concerned about provision on the ground. In my constituency of Eastbourne, we are desperately short of specialised dementia day-respite provision, and even more so of overnight and longer term respite. The funding to my local county council has not kept up with demand. That has been the case over the last 10 to 15 years, so it is not a recent phenomenon, but as a result of funding restrictions East Sussex county council has had to close a couple of respite care centres over the past few years, and I know that there are similar situations across the country. To put it bluntly, we in Eastbourne need at least three to four times more specialist dementia respite care provision, and I suspect that, broadly, there is a similar shortage across England and Wales.

This is not a new problem, and I am glad the coalition is recognising it by pledging an additional £2 billion. It is very significant that that extra money is being made available, especially in the current difficult times, so I am grateful for that, but I also want the detail, because I still have concerns about the pledges at the top not filtering down to the grass roots. Early diagnosis and intervention are essential to ensure taxpayers get the best value out of the substantial amounts the Government are spending on health and social care, and that will guarantee the best quality of life for dementia sufferers. This step will also reduce crisis admissions to hospital and release significant cost savings.

My hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tracey Crouch) and I are members of the all-party group on dementia, and the Alzheimer’s Society has been tremendously helpful in providing support to our group. Recent evidence collated by the Alzheimer’s Society shows that only 40% of people with dementia have been given a formal diagnosis, and the figure varies considerably across the UK. Where people do receive a diagnosis, it often comes late on in their condition, limiting the choices that people with dementia and their carers can make.

In addition to being given a diagnosis of dementia, people with the illness need to be able to access support and care early on in their condition, as my hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth North (Penny Mordaunt) was saying. Services for people with dementia are skewed towards those in crisis situations, and people in the acute and long-term care sectors. As I have indicated, there is a lack of provision of support and care for the people with dementia who live in their own homes.

Despite the projection that more than 1 million people will have dementia by 2025, dementia research is severely underfunded in comparison with research into other major diseases such as heart disease or cancer. For example, the Government spend eight times less on dementia research than they do on cancer research. Not in a million years would I want to reduce the amount of money spent on cancer research but, as we all know from our constituencies, dementia is a time bomb ready to explode. I know that the Government are investing more on research but I want to hear some of the detail. Clearly more money must be spent on research into this condition, as developing new treatments has the potential to reduce significantly the number of people with dementia. For example, delaying the onset of dementia by five years would halve the number of deaths from the condition, thus saving 30,000 lives a year. I therefore welcome the coalition’s commitment—this was also a pledge in the Liberal Democrat manifesto—to prioritise dementia research within the health research and development budget, and I look forward to reading the Department’s plan to improve the volume, quality and impact of dementia research.

The Dilnot commission, which is due to report next month, provides an opportunity to resolve the historic and unsolved question of whether, as a society, we are able and willing to support people to live well in later life. The Dilnot commission must propose a road map for the delivery of a long-term settlement on the question of who pays for care and one that delivers significant improvements in access and quality. The funding envelope for social care must be increased to meet the needs of our ageing population, including the increasing number of people with dementia.

So what would I like to see happen? First, I wish to see a long-term settlement for social care that offers good quality care for people with dementia at a fair price, along with a set of guarantees about what people can expect to receive. As a starting point, I challenge the Minister by saying that the state should provide a minimum level of care and support for free. Guarantees about the care to be provided should include access to early intervention services, regular short breaks for carers and a guarantee that the care will be of high quality. One of the things to come out of recent research is that the earlier dementia is identified, and the earlier interventions are made and people with dementia are supported in a respite care background, the more the worse rate of dementia appears to be delayed—already we know that it is delayed by a good two or three years. So this is one of those things that really would save money in the long term.

If we are to revisit the Health and Social Care Bill, as I believe we may well do very soon, I would also like to see something else that is important. I know that the Minister feels passionately about this, so I am glad to be pushing at an open door. I am talking about better joined-up working between health and social care. However many years ago it took place and for whatever reason, it was a catastrophe that we split social care from the NHS. That has been appalling because social care budgets have been trimmed repeatedly over the years. In Eastbourne, as in every constituency, the social care sector deals with the respite care provision and the money has been cut every year, whereas the NHS, where money has not been cut—a lot of investment has gone into the NHS in the past 15 to 17 years—is dealing with people with dementia right at the crisis stage. It is an incredibly inefficient way of dealing with a desperate illness and it does not make financial sense. Better joined-up working between health and social care is essential for people with dementia.

I believe that integration of care pathways across health and social care services should also be considered a duty, similar to effectiveness, safety and quality, and should be applicable to all health bodies from the Secretary of State downwards. I recognise the important role that health and wellbeing boards could play in encouraging greater integration between health and social care and I strongly endorse their inclusion in the Bill. Health and wellbeing boards can also provide a strategic oversight for the development of local health and social care services and the proposed boards in the Bill must have a strong focus on dementia.

Finally, we come to multi-disciplinary commissioning. Let me use my partner as an example again: she is a community matron and her job is to go out into the community and to help people, mostly older people, to retain their independence by living at home. A lot of her work involves liaising with social services, the primary care trusts and the acute trust and doing all the multi-disciplinary co-ordination that is so necessary. We need to bring it into commissioning. I am concerned that most GPs might not necessarily know enough about dementia to commission effective services, so it would be beneficial in my view if a range of health and social care professionals could also be involved. I am not against GP consortia in principle, but I merely want more professionals from the different areas of health and social care to be involved in the commissioning process, such as nurses, occupational therapists and old age psychiatrists.

I suspect that we have all been touched personally by the impact of dementia on someone we love. In my family, two of my aunts had dementia and one still lives with it every day. It is a desperate illness that affects hundreds of thousands of people and it has an impact on millions. My aunt is an example: she is a lady who rode a scooter from Nairobi to Johannesburg and climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in the ’50s. She is an amazing, great woman who was a teacher for 50 years in east Africa. The dementia she has now is desperately sad—thankfully not so much for her, but for all the family around her. It is a desperate illness that affects many people and it is not going away any time soon. As a nation, we need to move up a gear. We need to get better at providing care for dementia sufferers and their families and we need to do it now.