MPs warned that funding cuts were becoming “more urgent day by day” and said the Government needed to overhaul the social care system and raise funding.

The report also warned that the government’s reforms of the NHS were proving a “distraction” and putting attempts to save £20 billion by 2014 in jeopardy.

The committee said far-reaching reorganisation of health services was needed to make the savings, yet NHS trusts were still trying to “salami slice” budgets and reach their targets with short-term cuts.

The situation was not sustainable and the magnitude of the challenge had not been fully grasped, it said.

The committee recommended that the Government consider diverting more money from the NHS into social care.

The survey conducted on behalf of the committee found that councils had reduced spending on care home placements by providing fewer places and driving down the fees paid to homes.

Two thirds also planned to cut long-term support in the community.

Councils were also planning to increase charges made to patients. More than a third had raised their maximum personal charge for social care, almost four in 10 had increased their charges for residential care and half had raised their charges for services such as home help.

Stephen Dorrell, the chairman of the committee, said: “Social care needs to move dramatically up the priority scale to create a more integrated service.”

The report warned that money which should have been spent on integrating the NHS and social care had gone on propping up current services.

The King’s Fund has already estimated that there are 800,000 elderly people who need care but do not receive state help.

Louise Lakey, the policy manager at the Alzheimer’s Society, said “chronic underinvestment” in social care must end.

Michelle Mitchell, the charity director at Age UK, said: “Social care is in crisis. There are fewer services available, yet the numbers of people needing social care is growing.” She urged ministers to heed calls for urgent action.

Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, said: “We are giving more money to social care — in 2010 the Government committed an extra £7.2 billion for the future of social care. This money means that councils have enough to maintain the current levels of access and eligibility.” He said councils needed “to work smarter” with their “health professional colleagues”.

The report said NHS reforms continue to complicate the push for efficiency gains. NHS bodies were “squeezing existing services simply to get through the first year of the programme” rather than looking for long-term reforms, it found.

Mr Lansley said: “Our plans for modernisation are essential if we are to put the NHS on a sustainable footing for the future.”

The design of a care environment directly impacts on a resident’s ability to care for themselves and on their dependency on staff. By creating simple design features that help them complete basic tasks such as dressing, eating, or finding their way around their environment their quality of life could be greatly improved. The staff workload reduced, thereby allowing time for more meaningful engagement between carers and residents.

Care Homes should strive to create an environment that promotes independence and improves the lives of those living within the establishment.

Managers and owners of Care Homes only have to make small improvements, which can result in  a positive effect for residents with dementia and the staff support for them.

The use of colour is important, as is strategically placed signage. The use of visual clues that are commonly recognized will help the residents to find their way round.

The person centered approach on bedroom doors is key to a person recognizing the door to their bedroom. Giving people visual clues to identify rooms and areas in a care environment are vital.

Look out for dementia warning signs, families urged

By Jane Hughes Health correspondent, BBC News

820,000 people in the UK have dementia

Families are being urged to look out for the warning signs of dementia when they visit their elderly relatives.

It is part of a government advertising campaign in England aimed at encouraging early diagnosis.

Experts believe the festive period is a time when many people realise family members may have a memory problem.

They are now being warned to act on it and seek help by the Department of Health, which is launching a TV and national press campaign on the issue.

The government advert tells the story of a man in the early stages of dementia, and his daughter, who feels she is losing her father.

It highlights the importance of contacting a GP if you have symptoms like memory loss, confusion and anxiety.

“People are afraid of dementia,” said care services minister Paul Burstow.

Alzheimer’s sufferer Derek Wilson: ”I knew that there was something wrong with me”

“Rather than face the possibility someone we love has the condition, we can wrongly put memory problems down to ‘senior moments’,” he said.

“Don’t wait until a crisis. Being diagnosed with dementia won’t make the condition worse, but leaving it untreated will.”

Christmas alert

A lot of relatives first notice problems when they visit family members over Christmas, prompting a big increase in calls to the Alzheimer’s Society’s helpline. This January it had a 43% rise.

Chief executive Jeremy Hughes said: “It’s when you see someone you perhaps haven’t seen for a while that you can see the difference.”

“If their memory is going, if they’re getting confused, if they have sudden mood changes, that’s the time to say ‘maybe you should see your doctor’.”

More than 800,000 people in the UK have dementia – and many are never diagnosed. There is no cure, but with the right treatment, the symptoms can be slowed down.

Dementia signs

• Struggling to remember recent events
• Problems following conversations
• Forgetting the names of friends or objects
• Repeating yourself
• Problems with thinking or reasoning
• Confusion in familiar places

“Getting a timely diagnosis is vital,” said Professor Alistair Burns, the national clinical director for dementia.

“Knowing about their condition helps people gain control, and allows them and their families to seek the support and services they need.”

But GPs say those services are not always available to their patients, and that growing financial pressures in the NHS could mean cuts to the level of support they can offer.

Dr Clare Gerada, of the Royal College of GPs, said: “GPs need to have access to a wide range of resources, such as memory clinics, so they can support people beyond diagnosis, and help them live healthy independent and productive lives for as long as possible.”

“We have to make sure we’re not simply extending the time someone lives with a dementia diagnosis, without giving them the support they need,” she added.

But in aging, as in many things, attitude can make all the difference. Research has shown that how people feel inside, and their expectations of their capabilities, can have a greater impact on health, happiness and even longevity than the date on their birth certificates.

In her seminal “counterclockwise” study, in 1979, Harvard University psychologist Ellen Langer brought men in their 70s and 80s to a weeklong retreat that was retrofitted, from the music to the newspapers, to look and feel like 1959. One group of men was told to reminisce about the era. The other group was told to let themselves be who they were 20 years earlier.

By the end of experiment, both groups of men, who upon entering had been highly reliant on relatives to do things for them, were functioning independently, actively completing chores, and showed significant improvements in hearing, memory, strength and intelligence tests. The group told to behave like they were 20 years younger also showed better dexterity, flexibility and looked younger, according to outside observers who judged photos of the participants taken before and after the retreat.

Expectation, not biology, leads many elderly people to set physical limits on themselves, Langer concluded; they assume they’ll fall apart, so they let it happen.

“What we want to do is not get older people to think of themselves as young, but to change their mindsets about what it means to be older,” Langer said. And being older doesn’t have to equal decay.

Take memory. Thirty-year-olds forget lots of things, but they don’t blame dementia. Older people jump to the conclusion that memory failures are part of their inevitable decline, when in fact it could be that their values change about what’s meaningful enough to remember, Langer said.

Rather than declare failure when they aren’t as nimble on the tennis court or as spry on the stairs as they used to be, older people should recognize that anything is still possible; they just may have to try a few different strategies, Langer says.

Internalizing negative stereotypes about aging can have dire health consequences, even among the young, some studies suggest.

Men and women over 50 with more positive self-perceptions of aging lived 7.6 years longer than those with negative perceptions, according to a 2002 study led by Yale University epidemiology and Psychology Professor Becca Levy. Young, healthy people under 50 who held negative attitudes toward the elderly were more likely to experience a cardiovascular disorder over the next four decades than their peers who had more positive view of the elderly, a 2006 study by Levy found.

Source: Seniors World Chronicle

Recently, I was thrilled to read an article by Dr. Robert Stern, Director of the Boston University Alzheimer’s Disease Center. Stern simply explained that, “Dementia is a symptom, and Alzheimer’s is the cause of the symptom. A good analogy to the term dementia is “fever.” Fever refers to an elevated temperature, indicating that the person is sick, but it does not touch on any information on what is causing the sickness.” So, basically what he’s saying is that dementia is not the disease; it is one of the symptoms of the disease.

There are many causes of dementia and some are reversible. But unfortunately, 70-80 percent of all cases occur from Alzheimer’s which is not rescindable. In fact it is fatal.

The word dementia has come to replace many old terms such as senility, having senior moments or experiencing a second childhood. It is important to know that dementia is not necessarily a normal part of aging. If it does present itself, the person showing signs should be checked out thoroughly.

The significance of a correct diagnosis could make all the difference in putting the patient on the right track and possibly curing the problem.

Now that we have differentiated that dementia is a symptom, what are the characteristics to look for? Well, the most prominent one is the loss of memory, which leads into the decline of other cognitive skills such as language, attention span, decision making and motor skills functions.

Fighting for the cause against Alzheimer’s includes educating the public to be aware of all the disabilities involved with the disease.

By GARY JOSEPH LeBLANC: Common Sense Caregiving

Serve meals in a quiet environment with no distractions.

Clear the table of everything but basic utensils and dishes; keep dishes plain use one colour.

Make sure the food isn’t too hot.

Serve only one or two foods at a time, and make every effort to serve the food the resident has chosen.

Try and have meals together as a group, and don’t rush the meal, let people take their time.

Be understanding if the patient can’t remember already having eaten.

Research conducted by Kings University London, show that 80% of people with dementia are able to make choices when prompted by pictures, words or the real thing.

There is evidence offering people choice enhances their dignity, don’t just give them a cup of tea because they had one yesterday, please enquire what they want today. Using pictures and words do try and give them genuine choice.

vca have developed the vca menu board plus 106  images of dishes and our menu book, will make a difference to your clients quality of life.

It was not so long ago that the dreaded “C” word would strike fear into most people. But medical advances have meant there is a cure or at least hope for most sufferers.

Sadly, not for dementia. It is a disease that chooses its victims indiscriminately and has no regard for whether people have led a healthy or unhealthy lifestyle.

Its effects are debilitating on the victim and devastating for their loved ones, and there appears to be no cure on the horizon, merely treatment if caught in time to lessen the effects.

With all the millions of pounds that’s rightly been invested in finding cures for cancer and the success rate that investment has achieved.   Perhaps the time has now come for the Government to shift priorities and  help those living with dementia and their families.

Our homes aren’t equipped to cater for dementia sufferers. But so extreme can be the symptoms that sometimes it is impossible for sufferers to remain at home.

There is a desperate need for more specialist places to be provided so people living with this disease, can be cared for by specialist trained staff.

Maybe campaigners trying to raise awareness about Alzheimer’s can learn some lessons from those who successfully fundraise for cancer and mobilise support in a similar vein, thus raising the profile of Dementia Awareness Week.

”Our results indicate that it is important for elderly individuals with visual problems to seek medical attention so that the causes of the problems can be identified and treated,” Rogers says.

The types of vision treatment that were helpful in lowering the risk of dementia were surgery to correct cataracts and treatments for glaucoma, retinal disorders and other eye-related problems.

Proper vision is a requirement for many of the activities that previously have been found to lower the risk of Alzheimer’s disease. These include reading, playing board games, other mentally stimulating activities, social networking, as well as physical activity such as walking and routine exercising. A visual disorder may interfere with normal mobility and may also hinder a person’s ability to participate in such activities.

However, vision problems and blindness are among the top 10 disabilities among adults and can result in a greater tendency to experience other health conditions or even to die prematurely.

“While heart disease and cancer death rates are continuing to decline, mortality rates for Alzheimer’s disease are on the rise,” says Rogers. “So if we can delay the onset of dementia, we can save individuals and their families from the stress, cost and burden that are associated with Alzheimer’s disease.”

Alzheimer’s Research UK, based in Great Shelford, funds projects investigating the debilitating condition, which affects 6,000 people in Cambridgeshire alone.

Dr Simon Ridley, head of research at Alzheimer’s Research UK, is urging would-be hikers to sign up for the Big Walk, a 10-mile circular ramble in Great Shelford on Sunday, May 22.

He said: “The really sad thing is there is never enough money to fund all the good proposals.

“We always have to turn down really good ones and that is sad for everybody, and that is one reason why we are trying to raise as much money as we can for dementia research.”

The walk’s fundraising target is £10,000, enough money to fund 500 hours of research.

Dr Ridley said funding for research into Alzheimer’s was increasing, but had lagged behind the money spent on research for other major diseases.

While the research budgets of some of the UK’s largest charities run into the hundreds of millions, Alzheimer’s Research UK only received £4.3 million in 2010.

Accounting for this situation, he said: “I think for a long time it was not really thought to be a proper disease. People thought it was something older people got.”

He said inspirational stories of people who recovered from some cancers, for example, can encourage people to support a charity, but people cannot, as yet, recover from Alzheimer’s.

But he said this did not mean the situation was hopeless – far from it.

Funds are being poured into projects working to detect the early warning signs of Alzheimer’s.

This includes brain- imaging technology and biomarkers, such as blood tests and cerebral spinal fluid tests, which indicate the status of a person’s health and could indicate the onset of disease.

Complex genetic research is also well under way, dealing with “risk factor” genes which could suggest how likely a person is to suffer from Alzheimer’s.

Dr Ridley said: “We are really focusing on trying to build up a much more comprehensive picture of what is causing the disease and we think from that, other things can – will – follow.”

Alzheimer’s Research UK relies entirely on donations to fund its research to find ways to diagnose, prevent, treat and cure dementia.

For more information, or to register for the Big Walk, email

bigwalk@alzheimersresearchuk.org or call the community fundraising team on (01223) 843899.