Project Lead: Professor Louise Robinson

 

Project Team: Dr Stephan Blossom, Dr Greta Rait, Dr Kate Walters, Professor Nadeem Qureshi

 

In the United Kingdom (UK), there are over 800,000 people with dementia.  Dementia has a huge impact on both families who live with the illness and our healthcare with care costs around £26 billion.  England has recently introduced dementia 'case finding'.  This is where GPs or nurses ask people, who are at high risk of getting dementia whether they have symptoms of dementia.  Some people are "at risk of dementia" because they have other health problems like Parkinson's disease and diabetes or have had a stroke.  This policy has been introduced with little testing.  We do not know whether case finding: i) is effective; ii) what patients and general practice staff think about it and iii) whether there are any harms or benefits.

 

We will seek the views of a range of people about assessing dementia risk in GP including case finding in people who are at a higher risk of dementia.  We are particularly interested in the views of certain groups of people: i) those at high risk of developing dementia (e.g. family history, past stroke); ii) those who had experienced case finding in primary care; iii) different ages and ethnic groups.

 

We will tape the interviews and review them to see what is said and what issues come out.  Data collection is completed; 6 focus groups were undertaken with 31 participants and data analysis is ongoing.