Dementia strategy: initial 2-year delivery plan - 2024 to 2026

Introduction

Dementia in Scotland: Everyone’s Story, Scotland’s new dementia strategy, was launched in May 2023. It is a 10-year strategy co-published by the Scottish Government and COSLA which sets out a shared vision of a Scotland where people living with dementia have their strengths recognised, their rights upheld and where they, their families and care partners/unpaid carers are supported to live an independent life, free from stigma. The strategy embraces a person-centred approach to providing support, treatment and care, when and where it is needed.

This Delivery Plan sets out how Scottish Government and COSLA will work with delivery partners to begin to realise this vision and should be read as a companion piece to our Strategy.

Everyone who has contributed to this plan acknowledges that improvement is needed to make the experience of living with, or caring for someone with dementia, better than it is currently. Our Lived Experience Panel, partners and respondents to our National Conversation tell us that they feel they often have to ‘fight for’ recognition, support and services. That needs to change.

Recognising there is good practice to build upon and we are at the beginning of a longer-term process, this Plan seeks to establish core ‘building blocks’ for delivery, creating a strong foundation for the strategy.

These will carry through to subsequent Delivery Plans, and ensure how we deliver actions and hold ourselves accountable brings about a new way of working in dementia policy, one that is focussed on ways to address the gap between policy, practice and experience.

This is the first delivery plan. Through it we set out:

• the principles, approaches and mechanisms we will use to deliver change and improvement over time;
• the priorities that form our work programme for 2024-2026; and
• what we will learn from in current policy and practice implementation to inform and shape next steps.

This Delivery Plan also seeks to begin our advance towards achieving the areas of improvement we want to make during the lifetime of the strategy:

1. recognising dementia as a condition of the brain that affects the whole person, while upscaling efforts to address its mental health and wellbeing impacts;

2. ensuring services and supports are dementia-inclusive and create environments which enable people with dementia to live their best possible life;

3. deliver equity of access to information, treatment, care and support for people living with dementia;

4. uphold a person’s human rights throughout their dementia journey; and

5. ensure people are supported by a skilled, knowledgeable and trauma-informed workforce.

In setting out how we will deliver on these, we are also clear this will be a process of collaboration and joint working across local and national government, working with stakeholders in local areas to realise actions in their communities. Scottish Government and COSLA will work together alongside other partners on areas such as monitoring, co-ordination and communication to deliver against these outcomes.

Subsequent plans will build on early progress, as we move towards the realisation of our longer-term ambitions, shared by our dementia communities.

As the first of a series of delivery plans, we acknowledge that some themes from the strategy may not be prioritised at this point. Through our governance structures and engagement with a wide range of stakeholders, from delivery partners to people with lived experience and academic colleagues in universities, we have identified where we can promote the conditions and environment for the strategy to be delivered in the long term, and for our combined efforts to make an impact within the first two years of delivery.

This is different to how previous dementia strategies have been set out. Rather than make commitments in Year 1 that run for the life of the strategy, we have identified measurable deliverables for the first two years alongside steps that will strengthen the conditions and environment for achieving the ambitions the strategy has detailed.