Sir, – Earlier this week the Health Service Executive (HSE) launched, with considerable fanfare, its Understanding Together dementia campaign, its aim being to raise public awareness and reduce the stigma and misunderstanding surrounding Alzheimer’s disease and the related dementias.
The programme reflects one of three interconnected work streams of the National Dementia Strategy and is designed to improve quality of care and quality of life for the circa 50,000 families affected by this condition across the country.
While a campaign which brings together some of the key organisations in the field of dementia care is hugely welcome, as most of us know, individuals and families affected by this complex and challenging condition need a lot more than “compassion”, “understanding”, “engagement” and “social inclusion”.
They need flexible service supports and they need their human rights to be respected and upheld; their rights to diagnosis, disclosure, treatments, rehabilitation and most importantly their right to live well at home in the community or in a place of their choice, with adequate services, supported by a well-trained workforce.
With funding of around €2 million, the Understanding Together campaign has received a mere fraction of the overall budget assigned through the National Dementia Strategy. The main bulk of the €22 million funding, philanthropic and HSE, is being assigned to boost community services, through enhanced home care packages, to help people live well in the community.
We are now half-way through the implementation of our National Strategy with sadly, no substantive improvement in community service supports for many of those families hugely in need, in fact ironically a recent six-month moratorium has been issued on all new enhanced homecare packages.
How long more must we wait and when is the public likely to witness a similar launch of this second and equally important strand of our National Dementia Strategy?
– Yours, etc,
Prof SUZANNE CAHILL
Director,
Dementia Services
Development Centre,
St James Hospital, Dublin
and Trinity College Dublin