Prioritise dementia or risk collapse of NHS, charity warns

Integrated care systems across England must place more priority on tackling dementia or risk the health service collapsing in the future, a leading charity has warned.Speaking at the New Statesman’s Future of Healthcare conference in London on 31 October, Kate Lee, chief executive of the Alzheimer’s Society, said that to the charity’s knowledge only eight of England’s 42 ICSs currently had a specific plan on dementia, with very few forming dementia boards, despite the charity offering to help set them up.Lee said that the number of people in the UK with dementia was set to rise from 900 000 today to 1.6 million by 2040 and that the total cost of caring for them was estimated to increase from £34bn to £94bn. “Without any intervention, we know that the dementia burden alone in the UK could potentially collapse the health service,” she said.Describing the disease as a “ticking time bomb,”…
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