Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps she is taking to improve the (a) identification and (b) referral process for dementia diagnosis.

NHS England is working with general practitioner 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 people whose records suggest that they might have dementia, but do not have a recorded diagnosis. Publication of the toolkit is anticipated by April 2023.

In 2021/22, the Government made £17 million available to clinical commissioning groups to address dementia waiting lists and increase the number of diagnoses. This included identifying areas of good practice in dementia diagnosis and provision of pre and post diagnostic support, which will be shared with dementia clinical networks and stakeholders. In 2022/23, NHS England has initiated a project to fund two trusts in each region to pilot the Diagnosing Advanced Dementia Mandate tool to improve diagnosis of dementia in care homes.