Former residents of an acclaimed psychiatric hospital will tomorrow present their case to have it reopened to a panel with the power to decide its future.

A social worker died after downing EIGHT bottles of wine. An inquest heard Julia Jones, 35, was “stressed out” by her job and was £150,000 in debt with partner Dale Barnett.

The long awaited review into the future of the NHS by Lord Darzi will next week propose a big boost in the size of independent nurse-led provision of primary care, similar in ambition to the rise of independent foundation hospitals.

Two people have been arrested in connection with the long-running child abuse investigation centred around a former care home in Jersey.

Jamie Thomas, nine, from Huddersfield, has been deaf and blind since birth. When he was born, he was very weak and had feeding and breathing difficulties. One ear was completely different from the other and he had a facial palsy.

The General Social Care Council (GSCC) is calling for an assurance from government that action will be taken against employers who fail to protect and support their staff when the new inspection regime for social care comes into force.

A CARER who attacked his “vulnerable” charge with a knife has been jailed for four-and-a-half years. David Cuthbertson, 49, of Blackburn Road, Accrington, had intended to slash his long-term partner Eileen Fleming’s throat with the blade, Burnley Crown Court heard.

Half of pregnancies among girls under 18 are now ending in abortions although the number of pregnancies is falling, an analysis by The Times has shown.

Ministers are expected to respond to this milestone by forcing schools to improve sex education, with children as young as 5 taught about relationships and older pupils receiving specific advice about sex and contraception.

Government figures yesterday showed that the number of abortions continued to rise in England and Wales last year, with a leap in the number of very young girls having terminations.

The increase last year among girls under 16, the age of sexual consent, was 10 per cent, from 3,990 to 4,376. For girls aged under 14, the number of terminations increased from 135 to 163, a jump of 21 per cent.

The rate of abortions for girls under 18 was nearly 20 for every 1,000 last year, while analysis of recent trends suggests that conceptions among under 18s will have reached 40 pregnancies for every 1,000 women.

The rising cost of dementia care could make the NHS financially unsustainable, scientists warned today. In a letter to the health secretary, Alan Johnson, dementia experts said more funding was needed for research into the disease to devise better treatments and reduce care costs.

One in five of the country’s 76,000 social workers has signed off work for 20 consecutive days or more in the past five years because of conditions such as stress or anxiety.