Dementia awareness

Dear Editor, Following another tremendous dementia awareness week, delivered in part by our wonderful volunteers, I wish to express my sincere appreciation to everyone who took time to support awareness-raising, fundraising and campaigning.

We opened the week by staging our annual conference which gathered world-leading researchers, academics, practitioners and policy makers alongside people living with dementia, to continue our movement for change.

I was truly inspired across the day by all the fantastic work taking place across the country to help us transform dementia care and policy.

There are more than 90,000 people living with dementia in Scotland today and that number is on the rise.

We have some of the most progressive rights-based policies in the world, but they are not all being delivered locally – that’s why, every day, we campaign to ensure people living with dementia are treated fairly.

We are tackling inequality head-on to ensure fair and equitable access to high-quality dementia support and information to help people to live well with dementia, and to support the urgent fight to prevent dementia.

Alongside this we must strive for more effective treatments which can target and, if not eradicate the disease process, at the very least delay it.

Drug discovery of this nature is in sight and that is why we are so committed to developing our Scottish research infrastructure and platform.

Research is informing us more about dementia prevention, how to improve the quality of life of those living with the illness and will ultimately help to find a cure.

You can play your part today by signing up to join dementia research, to help Scotland build the largest cohort of willing research participants and start your journey to help us transform our understanding of the illness.

Together we can be a leading force for change. Together we can ensure nobody faces dementia alone. Henry Simmons, chief executive, Alzheimer Scotland