Role of specialist care in dementia

There are 835,000 people in the UK who have dementia at an annual cost to the UK economy of £26 billion. Most people with dementia live in the community with one in three living alone at home with much of the care being met by unpaid carers. Seventy percent of care home residents have dementia. Dementia is an umbrella term that covers a multitude of diagnoses and problems from vascular dementia through to Alzheimer's disease via the fronto-temporal dementia and Lewy body disease. Specialist care has a critical role in supporting primary care's role in management. Specialist care includes old age psychiatry, geriatric medicine and neurology. In addition non-medical specialties have a significant role. These include community psychiatric nurses, occupational therapists, psychologists and pharmacists. Physiotherapy and speech and language therapists can be a part of management and assessment. In this chapter, we will describe the role of specialist care in dementia. There is no one model that fits the care pathways in dementia, and some of the collaborative models will be described.