Malta’s national strategy for dementia, launched this morning, includes a version that is easily understood by people who suffer from the condition. It is the first country to be introducing a dementia-friendly version.
The strategy makes Malta the 21st country to have a nine-year plan aimed at enhancing the quality of life of sufferers and their carers, who often had to leave their job to take care of their loved ones.
Launching the strategy, Charles Scerri, who penned the document “Empowering Change” said that most of the €63 million to €96 million spent annually on the condition, was on informal treatment at home, often putting people at risk of poverty.
He said the condition was growing from 44.4 million global sufferers in 2013 to an estimated 135.5 million in 2050.
A person was diagnosed with dementia every four seconds. However, less than 50 per cent of sufferers were diagnosed.
There are 6,071 people diagnosed with the condition in Malta, equivalent to 1.5 per cent of the population. This number is expected to grow to 13,000 in 2050, equivalent to 3.3 per cent cent of the population.
Taking the carers into account, the condition affected many more people, he said.
Dr Scerri said that although the strategy was launched today, carers were already being trained and the parliamentary secretariat had already issued informative booklets to raise awareness.
The strategy, which can be read here, has 85 recommendations including raising awareness, training professionals and carers to make a timely diagnosis, immediate after care once a diagnoses is made and psychological help for carers.
Parliamentary Secretary for Active Ageing Justyne Caruana said that, according to the World Health Organisation, dementia was the contemporary wave that would cause the failure of several health services worldwide.
She said that the nine-year time frame for the implementation of the strategy was realistic as Malta needed to build enough trained human resources and an adequate infrastructure.
Referring to the proposed electronic tags for patients with dementia, Dr Caruana said the secretariat looked forward to meeting criminologist Saviour Formosa, who proposed project that would test the viability of tagging memory loss patients.
He searching for dementia patients who wandered off was often a heavy burden on law enforcement.
Mr Formosa’s study, Dr Caruana said, had had not been held within the parametres of the strategy and academics should now tackle the matter within its context.
One had to keep in mind that dementia also had a social aspect to it and the issue needed to be tackled ethically.
Dr Scerri said the European Working Group of People with Dementia had great reservations about tagging. However, one could discuss how a person could give consent when the condition would have not yet taken in.