Blog: About Dementia's National Dementia Strategy Consultation Response
About Dementia recently submitted our response on the new National Dementia Strategy to the Scottish Government, following extensive consultation with our members, people living with dementia, unpaid carers and professionals. You can read the consultation response in its entirety here.
Our starting point, as with all of our activity, has been the voices of people living with dementia. To enable mulitiple opportunities to share views, we organised five online engagement sessions and fourteen in-person sessions. Additionally, we launched an interactive National Dementia Strategy Engagement Pack, to enable community groups to conduct their own engagement activity. We also visited 14 grassroots community-based organisations across Scotland on our About Dementia Roadshow. In total we engaged with 267 people including 83 people living with dementia, 84 unpaid carers and 100 community workers/professionals.
A key theme throughout our engagement was the vital importance of community-based approaches for people living with dementia. Many of the groups we visited adapted and changed their approach through the Covid-19 lockdowns, enabling contact and support to people who would otherwise have been isolated. With some of the challenges in accessing post-diagnostic support, often it is community-based organisations who are filling in the gaps.
"It’s vital that we make sure that the community and the third sector are properly appreciated. It’s lunch clubs, it’s memory cafes, it’s all those things that are happening in our community and I think they really need to be properly valued, which I don’t think they are right now"
– Third Sector Professional, National Care Service Engagement, 2021.
"We really need to appreciate how vital communities in the third sector are [to] that preventative approach… often being the first point of contact."
– Third Sector Professional, National Care Service Engagement, 2021.
