Maintain pressure on reforms to protect NHSCouncil launches probe into age discrimination in NHS and local government
Bristol City Council chief executive Jan Ormondroyd is to spearhead a government inquiry into combating age-discrimination in council services and the NHS.
She will jointly lead the project with Sir Ian Carruthers, chief executive of NHS South West.
Health secretary Alan Johnson announced the move at a conference marking the union of charities Help the Aged and Age Concern.
Mr Johnson said that the inquiry was tasked with identifying how local authorities and health services could combat issues that prevented older people getting fair access to services.
He said that proper diagnoses of dementia was one area that needed to be addressed.
“It is estimated that two thirds of people with dementia are never diagnosed, at least in part because their symptoms are often dismissed as an inevitable consequence of old age,” the Daily Telegraph reported him as saying.
Mr Johnson added that he expected the number of people with dementia to double in the next 30 years from the current level of 700,000.
He also said that social care could not be delivered on a postcode basis, with support to keep living at home available in some areas and residential care the only option in others.
Story supplied by Local Government Chronicle
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