Scotland’s Dementia Demonstrator Sites

Demonstrating that by redesigning services across the health and social care interface we can deliver better care for more people with the same or less resource.

Scotland’s National Dementia Strategy outlines key priorities for improving the delivery of care to individuals with dementia and their families and carers. Effectively delivering these improvements within the current financial context will require significant redesign of current pathways of care, including the movement of resources across traditional health and social care (social work and housing)boundaries.

The Dementia Demonstrator sites are three health and social care partnerships which are working with the support of a range of national programmes to demonstrate that whole system redesign can deliver better care for more people with the same or less resource. The three partnerships areMidlothian CHP, North Lanarkshire CHP andPerth & Kinross CHP.

The three sites have been dedicated to using approaches that suit their local circumstances as well as comparing and contrasting with each other the output and outcomes from which they and others can learn.

There are a range of national programmes and organisations which have a role in supporting local services to improve the care provided for people with dementia. As part of this work, they have all committed to work together to support the three sites and, in doing so, look for opportunities to better integrate their work nationally. They are:-

  • Joint Improvement Team, Scottish Government
  • Quality and Efficiency Support Team, Scottish Government
  • Healthcare Improvement Scotland
  • Alzheimer Scotland
  • Scottish Dementia Working Group
  • Local Authority Improvement Service

National Support is also being provided by SSSC and NES, who are responsible for implementing the Promoting Excellence dementia training and education programme.

This work began in April 2011 and the project runs till Sept 2013 – a challenging timescale for delivering whole system redesign. Therefore, each of the sites has focused their work on specific elements of the pathway redesign. To support the work, a small amount of central funding was provided to each site. However, all three sites have also accessed their local Change Fund allocation to support their redesign priorities. For more information click on

A key element of the national support concerns spreading the learning across the wider system, including the project’s evaluation. Links have been made to the work around the Integrated Resource Framework– IRF Newsletter can be found at Some minor extensions to this data set will enable changes in the use of health and social care resources by people with dementia to be tracked across the lifetime of this work.

All three sites have their own pages on the Dementia Managed Knowledge Network. We recommend you visit these to find out more about their current activities. These can be accessed at:

Revised – Dec 12