Voters – how you can make dementia a priority at the 2012 local council elections

Scotland’s local council elections will take place on Thursday 3 May 2012. This is a great opportunity to make your voice heard by the people who could be making key decisions about local dementia care and support in just a few weeks’ time.

Alzheimer Scotland has written a letter to every local election candidate in Scotland, asking them to pledge that – if they are elected – they will make dementia a priority in their ward. In order to do this, we have asked them to sign-up to our dedicated Local Elections 2012 webpage. We already have an impressive number of pledges, but we want to have a great many more.

How you can help

Read the letter we have sent to local candidates. If a candidate comes to your door, or you get the chance to attend local hustings:

• ask them about their position on dementia in your local area;
• find out if they know about the National Dementia Strategy and the role that local authorities have in rolling out some of the key changes needed to improve standards of care and support for people with dementia and their families;
• see if they have any plans to protect existing dementia-specific services, or to provide new ones.

If you have contact details for your local candidates (these can be found on local authority websites, usually under the heading ‘Notice of Poll’ or ‘Notice of Election’), you could write or email them directly about these issues.

We are also using Twitter to promote this campaign to local election candidates, as many candidates have active Twitter feeds. If you use Twitter and would like to help us campaign in this way, then you can find our Twitter feed at twitter.com/alzscot.