What action it is taking to address the reported lack of specialist dementia beds in NHS Lothian.

The Scottish Government is assured that NHS Lothian has sufficient NHS specialist dementia bed provision and notes that the Board and its statutory partners recognise that there is a need to expand provision of specialist care home places. The Edinburgh Health and Social Care Partnership is revising its strategic commissioning plan, within which a market facilitation plan will outline how the partnership will work with service providers to ensure the right level of capacity is available across the city.
In addition, NHS Lothian have a range of services designed to help avoid unnecessary admissions into specialist or acute care and to support people with dementia to remain at home for as long as possible, including post-diagnostic support, complex care, rapid response and older adult intensive home care services.
We continue to support the local whole-system transformation of dementia care across Integration Joint Boards, to reduce any unnecessary dependency on specialist dementia beds and increase the capacity and quality of community-based care. This includes action in our 2017-2020 National Dementia Strategy to increase access to post-diagnostic support, improve integrated home care and develop a national approach to dementia palliative and end of life care. In addition, we have funded Alzheimer Scotland’s national specialist nurse to take forward a review of specialist NHS dementia care. We expect that this report will be published within the next couple of months. The review will include an overall assessment of the quality of current provision, how well services are integrated within the broader health and social care landscape and recommendations on how services might be re-configured locally as part of the wider picture of whole-system re-design.