On the point of the GP, on a more positive note: I had to have a telephone appointment with the GP in relation to Dad’s medication, not his… not his Alzheimer’s medication, something else, and I just asked that question, I said, “So, we’ve been referred back to the GP, is there anything place?” and was kind of half knowing the answer, and she said, “Well actually, we’re… we’re just in the process of looking at inviting people with the condition to come in for an annual review,” and we had that about three or four weeks ago, and I have to say it was very, very thorough, and it was a… I mean a… I don’t know if you know but in the NHS you… a GP appointment is probably a maximum of 10 minutes, you know, that they allocate 10 minutes for it, but this appointment was 30 minutes, and the guy that we saw, we had… we hadn’t met him before but he was very respectful, very friendly, he said… much like yourself, he said, “I’ve got a list of questions here,” but he said, “but what I want to do is have a conversation with you,” and he said, “I’ll fill in the questions… fill in the answers later,” so it immediately put Dad at his ease and he asked how he was feeling, how he was coping at home, what he was doing, pretty much asked the questions that I’ve given you some answers to today, but it was reassuring to know that it… that they had that in place, and that we’ll have a call next year to do the same. A couple of things were identified during that meeting, unrelated to the Alzheimer’s, but, you know, Dad being old, that there was the occasional ailment that needs looking at, so he’s been for a chest X-ray as a result; we wouldn’t have had that if we hadn’t have had that meeting.

OK, and that sounded like it was new, was it?

Yeah, yeah, they said, that the way he put it, he said, “Particularly with Covid, and we sat back and realised that lots of older people were passing away, and they were passing away as a result of things that they were getting, illnesses that they were getting,” I’m not articulating this very well, so bear with me, a… “but we as a practice felt that we would do better by seeing them in advance and identifying issues and being able to deal with them rather than when it’s too late,” so I don’t know if they’re applying it to all people over a certain age, or all people over a certain age with dementia, but it certainly felt like it was as a result of the dementia.