To ask the Minister of Health to detail the actions he is taking to ensure the provision of the newest and most effective drugs to treat dementia.

My Department has a formal link with NICE under which its technology appraisals for medicines are reviewed locally for their legal and policy applicability here. Where found to be applicable they are endorsed by my Department for implementation within the Health and Social Care system. Actions to ensure the provision of new drugs will be taken forward at that time, however my Department’s initial assessment is that the deployment of novel therapeutic agents for dementia will require significant additional resources to redesign clinical pathways, increase regional imaging capacity and develop the service infrastructure needed to ensure the timely and equitable rollout of these agents, should they be endorsed for implementation in Northern Ireland.

In circumstances where NICE has not yet fully appraised, or does not recommend a particular drug, it is not routinely commissioned for use in Northern Ireland. However, the Individual Funding Request process provides a mechanism to consider requests from clinical consultants for treatments for individual patients that fall outside the range of services routinely commissioned.