Memory clinic patient volumes more than doubled over 25 years as referral thresholds broadened, national survey finds

A repeated national survey of hospital-based memory clinics in the Netherlands, tracking practice from 1998 to 2023, found patient volume per clinic rose from around 130 per year to 324 per year Audit/Data. Over the same period, the proportion of attendees receiving a dementia diagnosis fell from 80% to 47%, as clinics increasingly assessed patients with milder cognitive presentations. Nearly a third of clinics (31%) reported that their infrastructure was not yet ready to support monoclonal antibody treatment pathways for Alzheimer’s disease.

This is Dutch, hospital-based survey data, and the structure of memory clinic services in the Netherlands does not map directly onto NHS memory service configurations, so these figures should be read as an international comparator rather than a direct measure of NHS capacity.

The pattern it describes — rising volume, broadening referral thresholds, and clinics reporting readiness gaps for new treatment pathways — is a relevant benchmark for memory clinic capacity planning generally, as disease-modifying Alzheimer’s treatments move closer to wider availability and referral thresholds elsewhere may be expected to broaden in similar ways.