Diolch, Dirprwy Lywydd. I'd like to start by thanking the Business Committee, as well as colleagues across the Senedd, for their support in facilitating this debate. Today I look forward to Members' contributions to this debate, which is very clearly a cross-party issue. In tabling this motion in this Senedd, I've done so whilst remembering two women in my family who lived with dementia towards the end of their lives: Dorothy Walker, remembered affectionately as Dot, who was my great-grandmother, and Sandra Lewis, my grandmother, who passed earlier this year.

Dementia is a broad term that is used to describe a number of conditions that affect the brain. The most well-known type of dementia is Alzheimer's. However, each condition associated with dementia affects a person in different ways, which means that each dementia patient's needs can vary from condition to condition quite drastically. My grandmother, Sandra Lewis, was diagnosed with dementia with Lewy bodies, a little-known variant, which is closely related to both Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Dementia with Lewy bodies means that a patient presents with difficulties of movement, concentration and alertness as well as hallucinations. For my family, knowing and receiving the correct diagnosis was all-important, given the specific care she needed. However, this is easier said than done, and, for some time, there was uncertainty as to what my grandmother was living with. I'm only a layman when it comes to medicine, and in fact calling myself a layman is probably being a bit too kind to myself, but to get to a stage where there have been multiple diagnoses indicates to me that there is room for improvement. There were, indeed, several diagnoses, ranging from Alzheimer's to calcium and thyroid issues, and in the meantime, my grandmother was not receiving the care that she needed and her quality of life was deteriorating rapidly. 

Figures provided by the Alzheimer's Society point to the current diagnosis rate for dementia being around 50 per cent. With this diagnosis rate, we only know of about 25,000 people living with dementia, when it is suspected that the actual figure is closer to 50,000 people, meaning that half of people living with dementia in Wales are missing out on the support and access to services that they desperately need. If you look at what my grandmother's condition was, around 5 per cent of patients are diagnosed with dementia with Lewy bodies, but, again, it is estimated that the figure is closer to 20 per cent. 

As many dementia charities rightly point out, research will beat dementia. In Wales, it is only fair to acknowledge the work that the Welsh Government is already undertaking in this field. On this point, I would like to thank the Deputy Minister for her engagement on this issue. I do truly mean it when I say this: from our meetings together, I can see the personal drive that you have to tackle this issue and I am immensely grateful. We have seen in Wales an offer of PET scanning, which from what I understand has led to more accurate and timely diagnosis, and the dementia action plan does make provision for the Government to react and fund services when needed.

But it is important that we now build on this, and we can build on this through the creation of a national dementia observatory, similar in scope to the one already established by the World Health Organization. As Members are already aware, my main focus as a member of Plaid Cymru is the economy, and in the economy, in a similar way to health, data is all-important. The establishment of an observatory will allow us to disseminate and analyse data relating to dementia, which will inform decision making and could provide the information needed in relation to the dementia action plan that would keep it as a plan that is ever evolving based on our most recent data.