'There is still a shocking level of ignorance regarding dementia'

Our expert panel discussed the issues people with dementia face when accessing health and social care services

What are the issues that people with dementia face?

George McNamara, head of policy and public affairs, Alzheimer’s Society: Every day we hear about the struggle people with dementia have getting a timely diagnosis. While progress has been made in this area, many people with dementia are also at their wits end with the lack of timely and quality dementia care in their area.

Gill Phillips, creator of Whose Shoes? – Making It Real, a co-production tool helping people work together to improve lives: Finding the right support at the right time for people with dementia and carers. Things joining up. Avoiding hospital admissions – and if hospital is necessary, for staff (particularly non-specialist staff) to be able to understand and care for people as individual human beings.

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New global partnership aims to accelerate dementia drug discovery

Alzheimer's Society and Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation (ADDF) are offering up to $1.5 million to new research projects which could speed up developing treatments for Alzheimer's and dementia.

The international collaboration could help make the hope of finding effective dementia treatments within the next 10 years a reality.

Focusing on drug repurposing and repositioning, the new call for proposals aims to take drugs that already exist for other conditions and develop them as dementia treatments. Currently it can take up to 20 years and around a billion dollars to develop a new drug from scratch, but by using existing drugs, the partners hope to deliver treatments far sooner and at a fraction of the cost.

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