A significant milestone has been reached by John’s Campaign, the rapidly growing project to break down institutionalised barriers in the NHS and allow carers of people with dementia who are admitted to hospital to be able to stay with them or visit them at any time.
The campaign has been officially endorsed by NHS England in its newly published Commissioning for Quality and Innovation payment framework. It means a humanising change to the way hospitals respond to admissions of people with dementia – who currently occupy one in four hospital beds.
From April, financial rewards will be available to healthcare providers who apply the principles espoused by John’s Campaign, which began after a powerful response by Observer readers to an article written in 2014 by the novelist Nicci Gerrard. The piece followed the death of her father, Dr John Gerrard, who had been living well with Alzheimer’s until his admission to hospital for an unrelated condition earlier in the year. During his five-week stay, visits from his family had been severely restricted by hospital policy and his decline was catastrophic and irreversible. The public response to the feature made Gerrard and co-founder Julia Jones aware of the scale of the problem and they began John’s Campaign on 30 November 2014.
There are more than 850,000 people in the UK living with dementia and as a group their experience of stays in hospital is significantly worse than other people of the same age.
Julia Jones’s 92-year-old mother, June, lives with Alzheimer’s and vascular dementia, and the idea of an unsupported hospital admission for her is, said Julia, as unthinkable as it would be to expect a young child to cope alone in hospital.
The campaign has had an enthusiastic response from its earliest days and to date 250 hospitals across the UK have pledged to welcome carers of people with dementia whenever the patient needs them. The campaigners are pushing to have this policy embedded nationwide.
The action by NHS England has significantly moved the campaign forward by making the adoption of John’s Campaign one of the official choices available to clinical commissioning groups across the country from April. Alistair Burns, the national clinical director for dementia and mental health in older people with NHS England, said: “We would encourage hospital trusts, as part of the care they provide to individuals with dementia and their families, to consider facilitating an approach whereby the families and carers of people with dementia can support them fully while they are in hospital.”
Jane Cummings, chief nursing officer for England, was an early backer of John’s Campaign, calling it “practical, achievable and representing positive practice in terms of delivering truly person-centred care for people with dementia”.
“We agree that there should be open visiting rules for the carers of people with dementia,” she said, “And the evidence has shown that this is good for patients, good for carers and good for NHS staff.”
