Remember this time last year, when Jeremy Hunt decried the ‘national shame’ of neglected old people suffering from undiagnosed dementia? The health secretary lamented that fewer than half of dementia cases are ever diagnosed, and promised ‘to make a big change.’
His initiative got rave reviews at the time. Now that the details are in, not so much. ‘A bounty on the head of certain patients’ is how the head of the Patients Association characterised NHS England’s new scheme, to pay doctors £55 per patient whom they diagnose with dementia.
The so-called ‘Dementia Identification Scheme‘ began on October 1 and runs through March 31. It is, per the NHS document, ‘designed to reward GP practices for undertaking a proactive approach’. It does not require that patients be sent to a specialist for the diagnosis, if their case is ‘straightforward’, and specifies that ‘brain scanning [is] not always needed’.
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