Meeting of the Parliament 01 March 2023 [Draft]
My wife and I were carers to two elderly parents with dementia. I have experienced the condition from both sides—as someone with caring responsibilities and as someone who saw at first hand how two wonderful people’s lives were increasingly impaired by a loss of independent function. I have also seen how social care staff in the north-east have cared gently and attentively for people who live with dementia, and I pay tribute to them today.
The Scottish Government needs to back up its rhetoric on valuing social care workers, because they are tired of hearing platitudes. There has clearly been some progress in laying the groundwork for a new dementia strategy, and that is to be welcomed. It will affect upwards of 90,000 people with dementia in Scotland, as well as their carers and, as we have heard today, their families.
Dementia symptoms can cause serious confusion and profound frustration for the people who live with them, and they can be very distressing for carers and loved ones. Their experiences need to be addressed in any framework, as we have also heard today.
This will also be the fourth such strategy since 2010. It is important to point out that the number of patients aged 65 or over has increased by 20 per cent during that period, as the Royal College of General Practitioners has emphasised to us. However, the reality is that the current systems and structures that are in place across health and social care simply do not have the capacity or the resources to rise to the monumental task ahead. We just are not equipped to deal with it.
We have an ageing population in Scotland and serious national health service workforce challenges, from a lack of general practitioners to shortages of community psychiatrist nurses and allied health professionals. We have a chronically underresourced social care system and a social care recruitment crisis contributing to delayed discharge and bed blocking in our hospitals. It is shocking that a patient in NHS Grampian in my region had their discharge delayed by 2,312 days. However, that is just the reality of the system.
The proposed national care service is deeply flawed and simply kicks the can down the road. We need immediate action. The Royal College of Physicians has also emphasised the wide variation in the number of consultant geriatricians across the country, with the north of Scotland having one geriatrician per 65,000 compared with the national average of one per 36,000. That must change.
Meanwhile, less than half of people who are newly diagnosed with dementia were offer post-diagnostic support during a vulnerable and potentially frightening time. Support should be person centred, accessible and available, but that is not the reality on the ground. We owe it to people living with dementia to get the fundamentals right to ensure that they have access to early diagnosis and post-diagnostic support, as well as appropriate palliative care as they near the end of their lives, as Marie Curie has called for. They should not have to bear the brunt of the dementia tax and the worry about how to cover the cost of their care.
We have had more than a decade of dementia strategies—it is time to start making a real difference.
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