We collect and publish data about people with dementia at each GP practice, so that the NHS (GPs and commissioners) can make informed choices about how to plan their services around their patient’s needs.

This publication includes the rate of dementia diagnosis. As not everyone with dementia has a formal diagnosis, this statistic compares the number of people thought to have dementia with the number of people diagnosed with dementia, aged 65 and over.

The outbreak of Coronavirus (COVID-19) has led to unprecedented changes in the work and behaviour of General Practices and subsequently the data within this publication will be impacted, including indicators and contextual data from Patients Registered in a GP Practice.

This data is extracted through General Practice Extraction Service therefore the burden of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak has not affected the data collection of this publication. The data has been impacted by COVID19, including the diagnosis rate (of those aged 65 or over estimated to have dementia have dementia) however we are unable to estimate the extent of the impact.

As such we urge caution in drawing any conclusions from these data without consideration of the country's circumstances as of 31st October 2020 and would recommend that any uses of these data are accompanied by an appropriate caveat.

Due to COVID-19 the usual annual update to the business rules for this publication has been delayed until December 2020. This has meant that the cumulative counts included in table 3 of the publication (Recorded dementia diagnoses, October 2020: Summary) show data for 13 months from 1 October 2019 to 31 October 2020, as does the CSV named Recorded Dementia Diagnoses by Age: Care Plans, Assessments and Referrals, October 2020. All other counts and files are unaffected.