There was a good turnout recently when colleagues from around Stockport recently came together at a workshop that was held to set aside some focused time with a wide range of partners involved in providing services for those affected by Dementia.

To strengthen and drive consistency and quality of care and support across Greater Manchester we’ve recently reviewed and updated our Greater Manchester Dementia and Brain Health Quality Standards. These 18 high level standards provide a vision for everyone in Greater Manchester and the standards are designed to be adopted by localities alongside the Dementia and Brain Health Delivery Plan 2023 to 2025 and act as a benchmarks from which to drive quality improvement and reform

We’re working with localities and organisations to support self-assessment against the standards and to develop action plans. Over the last few months we’ve been working with all ten boroughs to develop a series of dementia quality standards self-assessment workshops, with one taking place in each borough. We’re working to support multi-agency teams in each locality, to create and drive forward their own dementia strategies.

There was a good turnout recently when colleagues from around Stockport recently came together at a workshop held in Stopford House hosted by the council and healthcare colleagues. The workshop was held to set aside some focused time with a wide range of partners involved in providing services for those affected by Dementia. The afternoon was spent carrying out a self-assessment against the recently launched Greater Manchester Brain Health and Dementia quality standards.  Stockport has a strong history in working together to improve the availability of services for people affected by dementia but this workshop was a great opportunity to take stock alongside Dementia United colleagues.

Stockport has a strong commitment to continuously improving its efforts for people living with or affected by dementia having produced its first Dementia Strategy in 2010, just a year after the Department of Health published its first Dementia Strategy in 2009. Since then, the council and healthcare providers have continued to work together to keep the approach fresh and are currently going through another refresh exercise just in time to incorporate the outcomes from the self-assessment workshop. Stockport is doing well nationally at diagnosing people and its dedicated memory assessment service has worked hard to reduce waiting times this year to just four weeks against a national standard of six weeks.

Phillipa Johnson, Deputy Place Based Lead for Stockport welcomed everyone to the event and said:

I’m really encouraged to see so many familiar faces in the room, all dedicated to delivering some excellent services and support to those residents in Stockport living with dementia.

 Having personally been affected by dementia in her own family, and recognising the increasing prevalence of dementia in our communities, Phillipa is committed to working closely with colleagues across the borough to focus more on prevention and lifestyle risk factors such as smoking, obesity and diabetes that could pay huge