Nottinghamshire Healthcare, the county’s mental health and learning disability service provider, in partnership with Bassetlaw Primary Care Trust and NHS Nottingham City, NHS Nottinghamshire County and both city and county local authorities, has been chosen as the first collaborative site for the implementation of the National Dementia Strategy in the East Midlands.
There are 700,000 people in the UK with dementia and across Nottinghamshire there are about 18,300 people who live with the diagnosis. Dementia affects individuals, their friends and family. A new national strategy has been launched to improve services for people with dementia.
Nottinghamshire will be the first site to go through the process of assessing, commissioning and implementing key areas of the strategy. The collaborative will be commissioned to develop specific pieces of work on specialist areas which will support implementation across the East Midlands.
This will put the collaborative in an excellent position to be ready to bid for national demonstrator site projects for the development of peer support groups and ‘pathfinder’ posts. Each collaborative site has been allocated £40k funding to get the project off the ground.
The collaborative will be expected to:
- Provide multi-agency leadership for the actions required at a regional sub-locality level and will be expected to ‘sign up’ to deliver an implementation plan
- Gather data to provide a baseline and measurements for improvement, relevant to locality population needs
- Feed back to the regional group about what is working and where more support is needed
- Share learning to promote faster implementation of the dementia strategy across the region.
The work is timetabled to commence in April and be evaluated in December 2009.
Simon Smith is Executive Director for Local Services within Nottinghamshire Healthcare:
“This is an exciting time for Mental Health Services for Older People and we look forward to the challenges ahead. For too long this service has been neglected – it’s good to see a national strategy being implemented and even better to see Nottinghamshire leading the way.”
For further information on dementia people can go to:www.dh.gov.uk/dementia
