Social care leader calls for stand-alone strategy to tackle the "biggest cause of death".
The government should reinstate dementia diagnosis targets and create a stand-alone strategy to tackle the "biggest cause of death", the Care England leader has said.
Speaking to TCHE after Social Care independent Commission chair Dame Louise Casey’s call on the government to appoint a dementia tsar to deal with urgent improvements needed in the care of people with the disease, Professor Martin Green said new policy should be explicitly focused on the condition and not “subsumed into the frailty strategy.”
He said “ a systemic approach” is needed that involves the NHS but puts social care in the driving seat in working to reinstate” preventative strategies” that had previously been in place under former Conservative prime minister David Cameron, such as developing dementia friendly communities that helped to prevent people needing crisis intervention.
He added that there needs to be a “central carers strategy” to enable more effective support of those supporting people with dementia, who are “often older people themselves”.
His comments came after the health secretary Wes Streeting said last month that he would look to appoint a "new dementia leadership role" within goverment as part of the reorganisation of NHS England and the Department.
He said the appointment would be informed “by lessons learned from the cancer tsar role” to deal with "one of the greatest challenges of our time."
