: Last year, Kerala became the first State to take cognizance of dementia as a pubic health problem when it launched the Kerala State Initiative on Dementia Care (SIDC), a public-private partnership initiative with Alzheimer’s and Related Disorders Society of India (ARDSI). A year hence, the programme has taken some definitive first steps towards establishing social support systems for the care of those with Alzheimer’s Disease (AD).
The project is being implemented by the Department of Social Justice, banking on the vast experience and technical expertise of the ARDSI.
The SIDC has five components, which include creation of comprehensive dementia awareness in the community; equipping doctors, health personnel and professional care-givers with technical knowledge and skills for managing dementia cases; establishing memory clinics for the early identification of dementia, care homes and day care centres for patients and the setting up a State Dementia Helpline, for giving guidance and information to families.
“We have been able to launch almost all of these components and we hope to expand these facilities to all districts eventually. Dementia care homes have already been set up in Ernakulam and Thrissur; a day care centre has been started in Thrissur and three more are being planned this year.
The government has allocated Rs. 1 crore in the budget for the project this year,” said Srikanth P. Krishnan of the ARDSI city chapter.
The ARDSI is now in the process of developing a brigade of professional care-givers for dementia patients, who will be employed at the care homes under the SIDC.
“The care of dementia patients requires a lot of special skills because they have associated psychiatric problems and behavioural issues that need to be handled well. The chosen care-givers will undergo six months’ training at the National Institute of Social Defence before they are employed. The training expenses and salary will be met under SIDC,” Mr. Krishnan says. The first of the Memory Clinics under the SIDC will be opened at the Thiruvananthapuram Medical College this week, under the Department of Neurology.
Families often miss the early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s as the early symptoms are generally treated as the eccentricities of old age.
But AD should be differentiated from geriatric issues as 10 to 14 per cent of dementia may be treatable and the progress of brain degeneration can be slowed down, if detected early
