Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many referrals to dementia specialists were made in England in each year since 2010 by local authority.

This data is not held centrally. While counts of patients who have received a dementia assessment and subsequently been referred to a memory clinic have been collected since the 2016/17 reporting year, the figures are not provided at an integrated care board level and are also not aggregated by local authority. This data captures the number of patients who have received such a referral, and does not capture the following:

• the total number of referrals, as one patient may have more than one referral to a memory clinic, but they will only be included in the count once;
• referrals made to memory clinics where the referral is not made following a dementia assessment recorded by the general practice; and
• referrals made to specialists where they are not via a memory clinic.
• Data from 2016 to 2022 can be found in the recorded dementia diagnoses publication, at the following link:

https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/recorded-dementia-diagnoses

In addition, data from 2022 to 2025 can be found in the recorded dementia diagnoses publication: Primary care dementia data publication, at the following link:

https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/primary-care-dementia-data

The counts available in the March publication of each year will provide the number of referrals made within that reporting year.