dementia scandal

This is dementia awareness week throughout the country. But how aware are we likely to become about dementia? The subject - and the people who suffer from it - are brushed aside, tidied away where they cannot be seen or thought about.

If they aren't lucky enough to have a "carer" - one of those stuck with the label which means they are usually unpaid and unappreciated - they are in "care homes."

Let's go into one of them, in the West Country. It isn't one of those which are the subject of scandal stories of "residents" being neglected and abused. This has a star rating and views out on to a lavish and well-kept garden. There is no one in it, even though it is a sunny day. Inside the old, converted manor house is a dayroom lined with armchairs and holding a widescreen TV set, currently turned off. Sitting in them are about 20 white-haired old ladies and two men.

There is a continual loud cry of "Help, help" from two of of them who cannot get out of their chairs except by a mechanical hoist. Another one

is calling "Take me home. I want to go home. Please help me." Another one - "Where is my daughter, find her for me," and another "I want my mother, where is my mother?" There are numerous care assistants, getting them into hoists and wheelchairs to take them to the toilet or to their well-appointed rooms, but there would never be enough of them to console these lost souls. Only a continuously loving hand could stop them, or the weekly sing-songs organised by the home's entertainer, who tries to improve their lives with games and trips out in the mini-bus.

Unless paid for by their local authority or the State, this costs each resident £750 a week each if they have incomes over £23,500 plus. For many of them, the money can only be found by selling their homes.

Why are they like this? They are suffering from dementia, an umbrella term which covers a multitude of medical conditions, but which are not routinely treated as medical by the government which treats it as a "social care" problem and not a medical one to come under the National Health Service.

Long ago, at the start of the New Labour government, their manifesto promised better care for the elderly sufferers. A Royal Commission made proposals which were never carried out. Now they are being looked at again and being brought before Parliament. But still it deals only with "social care."

The scandal is that dementia does not have to be forever an untreatable and unmentionable condition as TB and cancer once were.

In Cambridge, research teams are at breakthrough points in finding cures and prevention for dementia. But they are short of money. The Government subsidy is only one-eighth of that given to cancer research. Rebecca Wood, chief executive of the Alzheimer's Research Trust, says:

"The government expects its strategy's dementia care measures to save £1 billion over the next 10 years. If the government was really committed to social justice and financial prudence it would reinvest this money into dementia research." World leaders in the research, she said, were struggling for want of funds.

But, unhappily for the dementia sufferers and those of us, like Terry Pratchet, a supporter of the campaign, fated to join them, it is easier for any government to call for social care measures than for free medical help under the National Health Service. ends