Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps her Department is taking to provide additional resources to GP practices in deprived areas to increase dementia screening rates.

We committed an additional £1.5 billion for general practice until 2023/24 for additional staff to create a further 50 million general practice appointments through increasing and diversifying the workforce. This is in addition to a £4.5 billion real terms annual increase for primary and community care by 2023/24. The global sum allocation formula is designed to ensure that resources are directed to practices based on an estimate of patient workloads and unavoidable practice costs.

NHS England is working with general practice IT system providers to reproduce the Dementia Quality Toolkit (DQT) using SNOMED coding. The DQT includes system searches which can be used by general practitioners to identify patients whose records suggest that they may have dementia but do not have a recorded dementia diagnosis. Publication of the Toolkit is anticipated by April 2023.