Aged care nurses and assistants in nursing (AINs) will march in Canberra on October 13 to shine the spotlight on Australia’s growing dementia epidemic.

Nurses will join forces with aged care stakeholders, dementia sufferers and their families at the Fight Dementia March to call on the Federal Government to restore dementia as a national health priority.

Alzheimer’s Australia is calling on the government to allocate an extra $500 million in its 2012 budget to improve dementia care.

The organisation’s statistics show 269,000 Australians are now living with dementia and there are forecasts that almost one million Australians will suffer from dementia by 2050.

The march coincides with the Australian Nursing Federation’s aged care campaign, which is lobbying for an extra 20,000 nurses to meet the demands of the country’s ageing population.

ANF federal secretary Lee Thomas said nurses and AINs were at the forefront of dementia care.

“Every day, nurses and AINs working in nursing homes are caring for an increasing number of residents suffering dementia with the number of sufferers set to rise by almost 50 percent over the next 10 years,” she said.

The ANF is also calling on the government to inject $500 million from its 2012 budget into closing the wages gap between aged care nurses and nurses in public hospitals, in a bid to attract more nurses into the under-resourced sector with its ageing nursing workforce.