Beyond the Diagnosis

Recommendations:

• By working with voluntary sector dementia groups, the Mental Health Trust can better identify and provide better support to people with Mild Cognitive Impairments or early forms of dementia to help people remain independent for longer.
• Local grass-roots dementia groups want to have a stronger link with the Mental Health Trust and a single point of contact who is able to provide regular updates and help with referrals to memory assessments and other mental health services.
• Dementia Support Advisors should be given enough resources to increase their coverage and maintain regular visits to local dementia groups.
• The three dementia cafes run by the Admiral Nurses should remain open to all users with different levels of dementia without special referrals, including those that are not yet “known to services”. 
• Commissioners need to ensure that there is enough investment in the community to fill the gap left by the redesign of NHS services.
• Commissioners need to enable GPs to do more social prescribing. People are often not told about what dementia support services are available in the community, this has to change.
• Transport remains a big challenge for people living with dementia trying to access services in the community. This needs to be a top priority in any discussions on forming a dementia strategy for Manchester. 
• Alzheimer’s Society’s Dementia Connect database for dementia services need to be more widely promoted to encourage new services to add themselves to the database.
• More black and ethnic minority dementia groups are needed in Manchester. Information on dementia in other languages and information that specifically target BAME communities is still quite limited.