Hospitals often missing dementia despite prior diagnosis

Hospitals in the UK are increasingly likely to recognise that a patient has dementia after they've been admitted for a different reason, finds a new UCL-led study, but it is still only recognised in under two-thirds of people. This is the first study to identify an improvement in dementia diagnosis in hospitals over time, and also found inequity between ethnic groups for the first time. Researchers identified people who had been diagnosed with dementia in South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust memory clinics, and subsequently admitted to a general hospital. The researchers examined whether dementia was one of the diagnoses on the patient's hospital discharge summary. They found that among people who went to hospital within one year of being diagnosed with dementia, the hospital recognised their dementia 48.7% of the time in 2008, improving to 61.5% of the time by 2016. Across the study period, hospitals recognised dementia in 63.3% of inpatients with a dementia diagnosis, no matter how recently they'd been diagnosed. The study, available online today in Alzheimer's & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer's Association  as an article in press, also finds that those of ethnic minority backgrounds are almost twice as likely to have missed diagnoses in general hospitals compared to white patients.