I met with our research team, local mental health Trust Lincolnshire Partnership Foundation Trust (LPT) and East Midlands National Institute of Healthcare Research (NIHR) to explore how we could sign ULHT up to the national programme
Join Dementia Research. https://www.nihr.ac.uk/patients-and-public/how-to-join-in/join-dementia-research/
Initially it was about us clinging on the coattails of LPT after I was approached by their Medical Director but as is the way of the world this has now grown and what was initially being planned as a Trust awareness / launch session we are now looking at hosting a county wide approach with our partners from community health services coming on board too.
This clearly sits very neatly with STP, rural care and the current refresh of the Lincolnshire Dementia Strategy.
JDR is a different approach to research for us; it is about signposting our patients and families to the programmes, they then register an interest and JDR acts as a matchmaker to sign them up to appropriate studies across the country.
Our Clinical research teams have been an enormous help and support and will be the champions in taking this forward. To raise awareness and consider how we take this forward I have arranged a launch and awareness session on the afternoon of 1st December.
The draft programme for the afternoon includes presentations from members of the national and East Midlands NIHR JDR leads and LPT will be sharing their journey, we also hope to have representation from the Clinical Senate and I already have a large number of ULHT staff having accepted the invitation to help us consider how we as providers of care take this important agenda forward.
It is an exciting initiative and it will be great to see a collective partnership drive to contribute to what is perhaps one of the most under-researched conditions facing health and social care today.
Dementia research gets 13 times less funding than cancer even though the cost to society is far greater (Oxford University) Treating and caring for cancer patients currently costs around £5 billion a year, but the bill for dementia is £11 billion, yet despite the huge burden of dementia just 8p is spent on researching new treatments for each £10 spent looking after people with the condition.
In contrast, cancer research receives £1.08, more than 13 times more……