The Thursday Thinker: Dementia care v cancer care, a question for you - Editor's Newsletter

Which is why I think you’ll know the answer to this question: What is the UK’s biggest killer?

I suspect one or two of you may have instinctively thought heart disease or cancer. The answer is, dementia, and in a new report published by the Alzheimer’s Society, in partnership with the King’s Fund, experts have called for a ‘cancer-style revolution’ in the fight against this wretched disease.

And that got me to thinking, not least because I read the report on the same day that the NHS has announced Enhertu, a life-extending miracle drug that offers more time to women battling incurable breast cancer, is now available - after previously denying around 1,000 women a year access to it on account of it being too expensive - on the NHS.

For hundreds and hundreds of women, this is momentous news. Some women, we’ve learned, do not even know this drug exists because oncologists couldn’t bear to tell their patients that there was a key to the door of time available to them, but that they couldn’t have it. If you do know someone battling breast cancer, send them this newsletter just in case they are not aware of Enhertu and its new availability status.

Praise be to the scientists, clinicians and leadership teams at the forefront of cancer treatment. It really does feel like the progress that has come from investment and collaboration has culminated in incredible success in the field, but the same cannot be said for the ambition nor the urgency when it comes to dementia care.

I think the reason this is gnawing away at me, at least in part, is having been to see King Lear at Sheffield’s Crucible last week - you have two days left to go and see it. Ian McDiarmid does such a phenomenal job of portraying, in the space of three hours, the maniacal helter-skelter that is dementia, with sufferers hurtling inexorably towards an isolated and disoriented death that I cannot help but think about all of those people forced to ride that slide. Another reason, of course, is the passing of the Prime Minister’s father.

A cancer diagnosis today, we’re told, puts patients on a recognised pathway immediately. People aren’t just given hope, they’re given expertise, medicine, knowledge and understanding. More than that, they’re given a bloody good chance of kicking cancer’s backside. With dementia, we’re told, patients are lucky if they’re given a leaflet.

Carers for those with dementia find themselves feeling alone, exhausted, bemused. It is little wonder that anger and resentment can then begin to take hold. It is a place that can feel as though nobody gives a fig; unsupported, unloved, unnoticed.

I sit here writing to you knowing, or at least feeling, like nothing at all will come of my writing this. No policy maker will read it, no action will come of it and so I suppose today’s Thursday Thinker is this: how can we, together, contribute to catalysing a conversation that results in generational improvements in the knowledge of and treatment for dementia?

Look after one another.

James

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Word of the day: absquatulate. To flee. Abruptly leave. I hadn't realised that terrible bore, Gerald, would be at the dinner party regaling the room with tales of fly-fishing and shuffleboard shenanigans, and so the only thing left for me to do was absquatulate.

On this day, 1956: A 48-year-old solicitor from Manchester broke the water speed record. He did 79mph on Lake Windermere.

Happy birthday to: Des Lynam (I know, I did, too!), 84

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