Updated Quality Care Measures Issued For Care Of Patients With Dementia

Medscape (5/8, Brooks) reports, “Updated quality measures for the care of patients with dementia encourage physicians to disclose the diagnosis to patients and” those who provide their care. In a press release, the American Psychiatric Association acknowledged, “This is an ‘especially important and potentially controversial’ new addition to the measures on high-quality dementia care.”

The article quotes Robert Paul Roca, MD, MPH, “chair of the APA Council on Geriatric Psychiatry and co-chair of the working group that updated the dementia quality measures,” who said, “There is reluctance on the part of physicians to have this conversation because we really have no definitive disease-altering treatments, so physicians are concerned about the impact of the diagnosis on patients and caregivers.”

He added, “But we know that people want to know what ails them. They don’t want diagnoses withheld from them, so we felt it was important to include a measure that would prompt people to disclose the diagnosis,” he said.

The updated quality care measures were published online May 1 in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

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