Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will make an assessment of potential merits of establishing a single National Dementia Care Pathway supported by minimum service standards in the forthcoming Dementia and Frailty Modern Service Framework.

To develop the content for the modern service framework for dementia and frailty, we intend to engage with a range of partners over the coming months to enable us to build a framework which is both ambitious and practical, to ensure we can improve system performance for people with dementia both now and in the future.

We have already published the D100: Assessment Tool Pathway programme, which brings together multiple resources into a single, consolidated tool to help simplify best practice for system leaders and help create communities and services where the best possible care and support is available to those with dementia. The D100: Pathway Assessment Tool is available at the following link:

https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/improving-care/nccmh/service-design-and-development/dementia-100-pathway-assessment-tool

By helping places and systems identify where improvement needs to be targeted, the tool continues the work of the Dementia Care Pathway, covering all elements of the Well Pathway from Prevention through to Dying Well. Further information is available at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/mentalhealth/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/2016/03/dementia-well-pathway.pdf