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Norman Lamb: I completely agree. This disease knows no country boundaries. We all face the same challenge across the whole of the UK and, critically, across the world. That is why we pursued the matter in the G8 summit of December. There should be good collaboration across the UK through all of the devolved Administrations and the Government here. I am always happy to engage with colleagues from Northern Ireland to understand what we can learn from Northern Ireland and also because the exchange of information helps everybody to improve.
We recognise the need to build on the strategy. That is why the Prime Minister’s challenge on dementia is now the main vehicle for change and improvement across health and care, in the community and for the purposes of research. The Prime Minister’s challenge runs until 2050, not just outliving the dementia strategy, but broadening its vision and providing better accountability.
Last year we hosted the G8 dementia summit. I was delighted that the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles participated in it, and challenged me during one of the sessions. The summit attracted interest all over the world, and harnessed the efforts and expertise of the G8, health and science Ministers, the World Health Organisation, the OECD, industry, researchers, philanthropists and civil society to secure much greater international collaboration in order to tackle and defeat dementia. The declaration and communiqué announced at the summit set out a clear commitment to working more closely together on a range of measures to improve early diagnosis, living well with dementia, and research.
The G8 announced an ambition to identify a cure or a disease-modifying therapy by 2025, which we hope will focus minds internationally. It is backed by a commitment to increase significantly, together, the amount spent on dementia research—we know that at present it is a fraction of the amount committed to research in other areas of medicine—and to increase the number of people involved in clinical trials and studies of dementia. The United Kingdom has committed itself to funding a global dementia innovation envoy to draw together international expertise, stimulate innovation, and co-ordinate international efforts to attract new sources of finance. That will be incredibly important if we are to crack this disease.
In partnership with the OECD, the WHO, the European Commission, those involved in the EU joint programme on neurodegenerative disease, and civil society, the G8 will hold a series of high-level forums throughout 2014 on social impact investment—it will be critically important to attract new sources of funding—new care and prevention models, and academia-industry partnerships, which will also be extremely important. The G8 will meet again in the United States in February 2015, along with other global experts including the WHO and the OECD, to review the progress that has been made on the research agenda. That will enable us to focus minds and try to increase the momentum.
The G8 is an exciting global initiative, and I am immensely proud that the United Kingdom led the way in that regard. However, we are also keeping our focus on dementia in England, and we have made progress since the launch of the Prime Minister’s challenge. We have launched a new dementia friends scheme—which has already been mentioned—to make a million people more aware of what dementia actually is, thus helping
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to break down the barriers between people with the condition and their local communities. It is important to challenge the stigma that still exists in many places. The Alzheimer’s Society has published guidance setting out the criteria for becoming a dementia-friendly community. I was pleased to hear that Rothwell, near Leeds, is becoming a dementia-friendly community: that is very good news.
The NHS continues to support dementia care in hospitals through its CQUIN scheme—commissioning for quality and innovation—which is generating between 3,000 and 4,000 referrals for diagnosis each month. We have allocated £50 million to 116 schemes to make health and care environments such as hospital wards and care homes more dementia-friendly. Making the environment in which people live with dementia more dementia-friendly is critical to the provision of a calm atmosphere. When we see places to which attention has been given and in which investment has been made, we realise what a difference can be made. The Government’s mandate for the NHS prioritises dementia, and, as I said earlier, includes the ambition of a diagnosis rate of two thirds. My hon. Friend was right to say that the current rate is far too low. We are letting people down in many parts of the country by not securing early diagnosis.
Mr Ward: Obviously there is an opportunity to do something once a person has been identified as needing a diagnosis, but in my experience the problem is that other things are usually taking place in people’s lives, and GPs often assume that they are just part of the ageing process. There is a failure, often because of the lack of skills of the GPs, to recognise that diagnosis is required.
Norman Lamb: My hon. Friend is absolutely right and there are still GPs who do not really believe in the importance of a timely diagnosis. I have heard GPs say, “What’s the point, because it will make no difference?” However, we know it does make a massive difference not only to the person with dementia but to the rest of their family, in understanding the condition and what they can do to help. Education among GPs is incredibly important, and attitudes are changing but we still have a way to go.
Clinical commissioning groups are working with their local councils and other partners to better understand how widespread dementia is in their communities, including among people living in local care homes. This will mean they can identify and support people with dementia in a timely way. GPs are now able to use the new directed enhanced service to improve the diagnosis of dementia by asking people in certain at-risk groups about their memory. This proactive approach should help to identify patients who are showing the early signs of dementia.
Health Education England has prioritised dementia training and has already delivered 100,000 dementia-trained staff. Again, ensuring the work force within health and care have a proper understanding of dementia is critically important.
Hazel Blears:
I am pleased the Minister has now come on to the area of the work force. He will know that many of the carers in this area are paid the national minimum wage if they are lucky. Many of them are on
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zero-hours contracts. Many of them do not get paid for travelling between the appointments they undertake. We ask them to do some of the most difficult work that one can ever imagine but the rewards and the training and support they get is minimal. Is the Minister committed to tackling some of these issues in the care sector, which in my view are unacceptable?
Norman Lamb: I feel as strongly as the right hon. Lady does about this. We can never get good care on the back of exploiting very low-paid workers. It is not acceptable to not pay a care worker when they are travelling from one home to another. That is a breach of the minimum wage legislation unless their rate overall comes above that level. HMRC has specifically targeted the care sector and has found quite widespread abuse of, or failure to comply with, the national minimum wage. It is very important that it is complied with.
It is also important for councils commissioning care to be absolutely clear with those they contract with that they expect total compliance with the law. If a council is commissioning in a way which almost becomes complicit in a breach of the law, that is completely unacceptable. Some of the commissioning around the country is very poor and we have got to move on from commissioning on these 15-minute, short-time periods resulting from contracts being opened up for bids and there being a race to the bottom with the cheapest offer winning the contract. We have got to move on to commissioning for quality and for better outcomes.
Wiltshire has now introduced commissioning for home care based on outcomes and quality. One of the care providers now pays salaries to its care staff. So the whole attitude and approach changes and the incentive on the care provider is to improve care, not to get away with the quickest possible care visit.
It comes down very often to the way in which the care is commissioned. That is what has to change and we are working with the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services and the Local Government Association to change the way in which commissioning is undertaken. There is also an amendment to the Care Bill which will require that commissioning takes into account an individual’s well-being. Councils cannot commission on the basis of 15 minutes of care when important care work needs to be undertaken. They will not meet their obligation under the Care Bill if they are doing it in that
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way. That change will also help to drive up standards. Care workers need to be respected. They do incredibly important work, and they are undervalued by society.
Since 2009-10, Government-funded dementia research in England has almost doubled, from £28.2 million to £52.2 million in 2012-13. Over the same period, funding by the charitable sector has increased, from £4.2 million to £6.8 million in the case of Alzheimer’s Research UK and from £2 million to £5.3 million in the case of the Alzheimer’s Society. In July 2012, a call for research proposals received a large number of applications, the quality of which exceeded expectations. Six projects, worth a combined £20 million, will look at areas including: living well with dementia; dementia-associated visual impairment; understanding community aspects of dementia; and promoting independence and managing agitation in people with dementia.
The hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Steve Rotheram) made the point about doing research into how we can prevent the onset of dementia in the first place. We know that vascular dementia is often related to lifestyle, including factors such as heart condition, smoking and alcohol consumption. If we can understand better how to prevent dementia from occurring, we will achieve a massive advance. Research needs to focus on that as well as on finding a cure and on living better with dementia, which is another critical area of research. It is essential that we do all this collaboratively and internationally. We cannot simply find all the results by ourselves, here in the UK. There needs to be an international effort.
The coalition Government have clearly demonstrated their commitment to dementia, but there is a massive amount still to do. We are not looking inwards to solve the problems that we are facing. At the G8, we brought the world together to work collaboratively and to look for solutions. By leading the way with the G8 summit, and with our own domestic agenda of the Prime Minister’s challenge, the UK is mobilising all available resources. We should be proud of the leadership we have shown as a nation to date, but as ever, we will continue to push much further, and we must never be complacent.