Government Alzheimer plans

Alzheimer's Disease International supports the creation of high-level governmental plans to deal with the large and growing impact of dementia worldwide. Unlike international initiatives, these plans are capable of addressing the problem using a system tailored to the unique culture and demographics of each country.

Government dementia plans can promote the creation of infrastructure and accountability necessary to build dementia-capable programmes for the growing number of people with the disease.

A comprehensive government plan to address the needs of people with dementia provides a mechanism to consider collectively a range of issues including:

  • Promoting broad public awareness of Alzheimer’s and combating stigma
  • Identifying dementia capable support services at all stages of the disease
  • Quantifying the number of individuals with dementia
  • Assessing and improving the quality of health care, social care and long-term care support and services
  • Assessing availability and access to diagnostic services
  • Public health efforts to conduct surveillance and promote brain health

The creation of national and local plans published to date has involved government agencies, legislators, residential and community care providers, professional and family carers, researchers and physicians, and people with dementia.

An overview, published in April 2012, is available in National Alzheimer and Dementia Plans Planned Policies and Activities (PDF).

National Alzheimer plans

The links below will bring you to each country's plan, a table with links to the portion of the national plan containing 18 key points of policy that ADI has identified, and any available reports on the plan implementation.

Sub-national Alzheimer plans

In many countries, sub-national plans by region, province, state or canton are also in development because they are the most appropriate level of government to plan strategically to meet the growing impact, especially as many national governments are increasingly decentralizing to their sub national units for health care and public health planning.

Non-governmental dementia strategies

National dementia strategies are documents generated by private non governmental groups that can serve as the case statement to persuade governments to create a national or sub national governmental plan. In some of the strategies available below, governmental agencies played a role in the data gathering or consultations in the development of these strategies.

The key difference between these strategies and a government dementia plan is that in a government dementia plan the government is holding itself accountable for the accomplishment of specific objectives and policy changes, and is taking leadership even if objectives are accomplished with non governmental organization’s collaboration.

Action in Europe

Alzheimer Europe and associations in Europe have achieved policy action in Europe.

Acknowledgements

Funding to track the progress of national Alzheimer plans and provide the information on this website was provided by the Alzheimer’s Immunotherapy Program of Janssen Alzheimer Immunotherapy and Pfizer Inc.