He was gone twenty minutes before anyone noticed. The coat was off the hook, the back door was pulled to rather than locked, and the newspaper he said he was going for was already on the kitchen table. By the time his daughter rang 112 she was standing in the hall trying to answer questions she had never thought to prepare for. What was he wearing? She could not picture it. What medication was he on, and what happens if he misses it? Where would he go? Anywhere. The house he grew up in, maybe, except she could not remember the number.
That first hour is the whole thing. And since May of this year, Ireland has had an official document designed to give families back exactly those twenty minutes. Almost nobody seems to know it exists.
TL;DR
- An Garda Síochána and the HSE launched the Herbert Protocol in Ireland on 13 May 2026, supported by the Alzheimer Society of Ireland and Age Friendly Ireland. It is a 29-section questionnaire families fill in before anything happens, and hand to Gardaí if the person goes missing.
- The ordinary Garda missing-person report asks for name, age, height, build, hair colour and clothing. It has no field for a medical condition, no field for medication, and no field for places that matter to the person. The Herbert Protocol form asks for all three.
- In the largest UK study of its kind, 97.1% of people with dementia reported missing were found within 24 hours, and 90.1% came to no harm. But the odds of harm were almost three times higher if the person went missing at night, and nearly ten times higher if they were missing for more than 24 hours.
- An Garda Síochána publishes missing-person figures as three rows, with no age band and no condition flag. The word “dementia” does not appear once in the entire Garda Annual Report 2025, which does break road deaths down by age group.
- The form is a Word document on garda.ie, filed under Crime Prevention rather than Missing Persons. “Herbert Protocol” has never been said in the Dáil, the Seanad or an Oireachtas committee in the five months since the launch.
- You can complete it at a kitchen table in about forty minutes. Do it on a quiet afternoon, not in a hallway at midnight.
What the Herbert Protocol is, and how Ireland got one
The protocol is named after George Herbert, a veteran of the Normandy landings who lived with dementia and went missing from his home in England several times. His local police force realised that each search started from zero: officers arriving at a front door, asking a frightened family to recall details under pressure, losing the best hour of the search to an interview. The fix was almost embarrassingly simple. Write it all down in advance. Keep it where you can find it. Hand it over at the door.
Northern Ireland adopted it in September 2022, through the PSNI, Dementia NI, the local health and social care bodies and the Policing and Community Safety Partnerships. The Republic took a further three and a half years. An Garda Síochána and the HSE officially launched the Irish version on 13 May 2026, at the 18th International Dementia Conference in the Athlone Springs Hotel. The Alzheimer Society of Ireland supported it, and its Dementia Carers Campaign Network gave feedback on the drafts, which shows in the form itself.
Assistant Commissioner Catharina Gunne, who holds the Roads Policing and Community Engagement portfolio, described it as “a very useful mechanism for sharing vital information in the early stages of an incident where a vulnerable person goes missing”. The Garda page puts the operational logic plainly: a pre-completed form “eliminates the need for Gardaí to conduct lengthy interviews during the critical first hour of a search, allowing Gardaí to deploy resources immediately to the locations where the person is most likely to be found”.
That is the claim. It is a good one. The question is whether a launch has become a scheme.
What the form asks that the normal report does not
This is the part worth sitting with, because the difference is stark.
If you ring a Garda station today to report an adult missing, the official guidance on garda.ie asks you for: name, age, gender, height, build, hair colour, the date and place the person was last seen, what they were wearing, “any other relevant personal details”, and a recent photograph if you have one. That is the full list. There is no field for a diagnosis. No field for medication. No field for the places a person’s memory still holds on to.
The Herbert Protocol questionnaire asks for all of it, across 29 numbered sections. Some of what it wants is the kind of thing only a family would think of:
- The name they answer to. Not just their given name, but their nickname, and whether they recognise and respond to their own name at all.
- Language. Mother tongue as well as current languages, because people under stress often fall back to the language they were raised in.
- Any GPS tracker already in the house, including, in the guidance’s own words, “a smart watch, GPS bracelet mobile phone, or even a hearing aid with tracking”. Most families have no idea the hearing aid can do this.
- Vital medications, how often they are needed, and what happens if a dose is missed. That last one shapes how urgently a search escalates.
- Temperament. Whether the person becomes agitated, and crucially, “is there anything that helps them self-regulate and return to a calmer state?”
- How they react to a stranger approaching: fear, stress, aggression or confusion. This changes how a Garda or a member of the public should approach them when found.
- Travel. Access to a vehicle, a Free Travel pass or Leap card, which mode of transport they favour, and the specific bus or train route they tend to take.
- Places of emotional sentiment. A church, a day centre, a particular walking route, a building they used to visit. Then, separately, previous home addresses and previous workplace addresses.
- Whether they have gone missing before, where they were found, how long it took, and whether they realised they had been missing.
- Upcoming plans they may be aware of, such as a family holiday, and the names of people, pets and places they react positively to.
There is a space for a photograph, a next-of-kin section, contact details for whoever filled it in, and a field for the date it was last updated. Read as a whole, it is less a police form than a short biography written for strangers who will have minutes to use it.
What the evidence actually says about going missing
The most useful recent data comes from a 2026 study in Age and Ageing, which analysed every missing-person incident recorded by two police forces in England and Wales from January 2015 to December 2021: 1,540 incidents involving 1,286 people aged 65 and over, of which 414 were dementia-related. It is the largest study of its kind in these islands, and the findings are more reassuring than most families expect, with one sharp exception.
The reassurance first. Of the 414 dementia-related incidents, 90.1% ended with the person unharmed. In 97.1% the person was found within 24 hours. Most did not go far: only 9.1% travelled more than five miles, against 22.2% of people without dementia. More than three quarters, 77.5%, were reported missing from their own home or neighbourhood rather than from a care home or hospital. Just under half, 46.3%, were found by police, with members of the public finding 21.3%, family or friends 13.3%, care or health staff 9.7%, and 8.7% making their own way home.
Now the exception. Harm was not spread evenly. In the researchers’ model, the odds of harm rose by about 12% with each additional year of age. Going missing at night, between 8pm and 8am, was associated with almost three times the odds of harm. And being missing for more than 24 hours was associated with close to ten times the odds, with a wide confidence interval but an unmistakable direction. Thirty-nine people in the dementia group sustained significant harm, including one death.
One more figure worth knowing: around 14.5% of people with dementia in that dataset went missing more than once. Of the 49 who did, 34 went missing twice, nine three times and six four or more times. If it has happened once in your family, the form stops being optional.
The numbers Ireland publishes, and the ones it does not
An Garda Síochána does publish missing-person figures, on a page under the Missing Persons Unit, drawn from PULSE. As of 1 October 2026 they read: 11,891 missing-person reports in 2023, 11,902 in 2024, 11,891 in 2025, and 10,141 in the first nine months of 2026. Those reports related to 4,590, 4,095, 4,178 and 3,456 distinct people respectively.
Three rows. Reports, persons, and persons still missing. There is no breakdown by age. None by condition. No flag for whether the person was considered vulnerable. Which means that on the day Ireland launched a protocol specifically for people living with dementia, the State could not say how many of the roughly 11,900 annual reports involve one.
It is not that the data cannot be cut this way. The Garda Annual Report 2025 breaks road fatalities down by age group across several bands, and notes which bands rose and fell. It just does not do the same for missing persons. The word “dementia” does not appear anywhere in that report.
The absence goes back further. Ireland’s National Dementia Strategy, published in December 2014 with 35 actions across six action areas, mentions going missing exactly once, in a passing line about “satellite navigation systems to help find someone who has gone missing” within a broader paragraph on assistive technology. “Wandering” appears once more, listed among behavioural and psychological symptoms in residential care. Not one of the 35 actions addresses it. A family reading that strategy for guidance would come away with nothing.
A launch is not yet a scheme
Five months on, the Herbert Protocol in Ireland shows every sign of a good initiative that has not been given a system to live in.
Start with where it sits. On garda.ie the protocol lives under Crime Prevention, then Community engagement, between the school programmes and the Youth Awards. It is not linked from the Missing Persons Unit pages, and the “How do you report a missing person?” guidance does not mention it. A family who goes looking in the obvious place will not find it.
Then the file itself. The questionnaire is offered as a Word document, with no PDF and no fillable or printable alternative, and the official filename misspells “questionnaire”. For an audience that includes people in their eighties, a .docx download is a real barrier, and an avoidable one. The accompanying four-page guidance is a PDF and is genuinely well written, but it opens by stating that the questionnaire “contains 27 sections” when the form has 29. Small things, and the kind that suggest nobody has revisited the documents since launch week.
The Garda page also tells readers the protocol will “help support the over 64,000 people living with dementia in Ireland”. That figure has moved. The Alzheimer Society of Ireland now cites 69,949 people living with dementia here, projected to more than double to 151,092 by 2050, drawing on Alzheimer Europe’s 2025 prevalence report. Around 63% of them live at home in the community, which is precisely the setting where 77.5% of missing incidents begin. More than 180,000 people in Ireland are, or have been, carers for a family member or partner with dementia. One in ten people diagnosed here is under 65.
And then the silence. Searching the full record of the Dáil, the Seanad and Oireachtas committees, the phrase “Herbert Protocol” returns nothing at all. Not a parliamentary question, not a committee aside, not a word. For comparison, the same search returns 1,868 contributions mentioning dementia, the most recent of them three days ago. A scheme that nobody asks about is a scheme nobody is measuring, and there is currently no published figure for how many Irish families have completed a form, how many have been handed to Gardaí, or whether handing one over changed how a single search went.
None of that is a reason to ignore it. It is a reason to fill it in yourself rather than wait to be told to.
How to fill it in this week
Download both files from the Herbert Protocol page on garda.ie: the questionnaire and the guidance. Read the guidance first, because it explains what each numbered box is actually asking for, and some of the questions are not self-explanatory.
A few things that will make it better:
- Do it with the person, not about them, if that is possible. Someone in the earlier stages of dementia can tell you which walking route they would take and which shop they would head for, and nobody else can. This is also the right moment to talk about the wider ground covered in our guide to caring for someone with dementia at home.
- Be concrete about places. “He likes walking” is useless at 11pm. “He walks the loop from the church to the creamery and back, anticlockwise, and he sits on the second bench” is a search plan.
- Use full addresses for previous homes and workplaces. Memory often reaches furthest back, and a 1970s address in a town forty miles away is a genuine lead, not a sentimental detail.
- Put in a current photograph and replace it every six months. A good likeness from last Christmas beats a lovely one from 2019.
- Keep a printed copy somewhere obvious, send a digital copy to one or two trusted family members, and fill in the “date last updated” box so you know when to revisit it. Medication changes, and so does the answer to “has the person gone missing before?”
While you are at it, look at Message in a Bottle, the free Lions Clubs Ireland scheme the Garda guidance explicitly asks you to attach. It is a small plastic container kept in the fridge holding a form with medical conditions, allergies, medication and emergency contacts, with a sticker for the fridge door and the front door so ambulance crews know to look. Kits are free through messageinabottle.ie, and are often available at health centres, GP surgeries and pharmacies. If you have one, the guidance says to attach a copy to the questionnaire rather than duplicating the information.
If it happens tonight
The Garda guidance sets out four steps, and they are worth knowing before you need them:
- Do a quick search first. The house, the garden, the shed, the immediate surroundings. Quick, not thorough.
- If you cannot find them, ring 112 or 999 immediately and ask for An Garda Síochána. There is no waiting period. You do not have to let 24 hours pass, and nobody will think you overreacted.
- Say that you have a completed Herbert Protocol questionnaire when you make the call, so the Gardaí know it is coming.
- Hand it over as soon as you can, digitally if that is faster. A photograph of the pages sent to a station is better than a perfect original in a drawer.
Two things worth adding from the evidence. Tell them plainly if it is night-time and the person has been out in it, because that is the risk factor that most reliably predicts harm. And do not assume distance: most people with dementia are found close to home, often by a neighbour or a passer-by, so the people on your own road are a real part of the search.
Consent, trackers and the awkward bit
The form asks whether the person carries a GPS tracker, and plenty of families consider getting one after a first incident. That decision deserves more care than a product review.
Ireland’s own National Dementia Strategy is clear that “the consent of the person with dementia should, where possible, be sought and obtained for the use of assistive technology”. That is not legal boilerplate. Under the Assisted Decision-Making (Capacity) Act 2015, capacity is assessed decision by decision and is presumed until shown otherwise, so a diagnosis does not hand anyone else the right to decide. A person in the earlier stages can usually weigh up a tracker perfectly well, and many are strongly in favour once they understand it buys them more independent walking, not less. Ask early, write the answer down, and revisit it. If you have not yet put the legal groundwork in place, our piece on what happens in Ireland when capacity is lost without an enduring power of attorney covers the ground.
Where to get help
The Alzheimer Society of Ireland National Helpline is 1800 341 341, open Monday to Friday 10am to 5pm and Saturday 10am to 4pm, or by email at helpline@alzheimer.ie. They supported the development of the Irish protocol and can talk you through the form.
Your local Age Friendly Ireland programme has been promoting the protocol at community events, and your Public Health Nurse is the route into HSE dementia supports, including occupational therapy assessment of the home.
At Críonna Health we keep returning to a particular kind of Irish gap: not a service that does not exist, but one that exists quietly, with nobody told and nothing counted. The Herbert Protocol is the clearest example we have come across this year. The State has done the useful part, and the form is free.
Print it before you need it. The twenty minutes you save will not feel like much until the evening you are standing in the hall, trying to remember what coat he was wearing.
This article is for general information and is not medical or legal advice. If you are worried about someone’s memory or about a recent incident, speak to their GP or your Public Health Nurse. In an emergency, ring 112 or 999.
📷 Photo by Howard Walsh on Unsplash
