Response to the National Dementia Action Plan 2022-2033 Public Consultation Paper

The Australian Psychological Society (APS) welcomed the opportunity to provide feedback in response to the public consultation paper about the National Dementia Action Plan 2022-2033, noting that this is the third national action plan and that the previous plan expired in 2019.

The APS commended the Department on their early engagement with people with lived experience of dementia, carers and dementia experts in the development of the approach to this new action plan; acknowledgement of specific populations and matters of intersectionality throughout the plan, whereby stigma and discrimination can amplify the challenges of receiving appropriate dementia care; and the embedding of measurement and evaluation within the plan.

The APS provided feedback about the proposed plan principles, vision, objectives, actions and evaluation and made several recommendations, including the following:

• Embed action plan principle/s and performance measure/s about co-creation and partnerships with people with lived experience of dementia and their carers, health professionals, industry, peak bodies, the community, priority populations and other stakeholders.
• Strengthen the approach to dementia prevention and support needs for priority populations, particularly First Nations people.
• Develop explicit actions for prevention and early intervention of poor mental health and social isolation as two key identified psychosocial risk factors for dementia.
• Expand the dementia stigma and discrimination reduction actions to include approaches that adopt behavioural science approaches that compel change even in the absence of attitudinal change.
• Embed psychologists as an essential workforce into the proposed actions related to dementia assessment and diagnosis, prevention, treatment, coordination, support and research.
• Develop actions that address the psychology workforce shortages and cost and distance factors that reduce community access to expert and timely dementia diagnosis and assessment.

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