Police are hunting 14 convicted foreign prisoners, including a robber, who escaped at the weekend from an immigration detention centre where they were being held pending deportation.
     
{mosimage}The fugitives were among 26 men who broke out of Campsfield House in Oxfordshire after a fire was started. Saturday night’s break-out came just five months after another blaze at the privately-run centre left seven people in hospital.

There have also been protests by detainees in recent days. Opposition politicians warned that the disturbances were a consequence of mixing foreign convicts – who have been decanted from over-crowded jails while they await deportation – with failed asylum seekers and other immigration detainees.

Supt Robin Rickard, of Thames Valley Police, said: “Having located 12 of the escaped detainees, we are working with the Borders and Immigration Agency and GEO, the US corporation which runs the centre on their behalf, to establish the identities of those who are still missing and get them back into custody as soon as possible.”

Parents are taking their children to accident and emergency departments unnecessarily and are clogging up the system, the head of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health said.

A psychotherapist accused of encouraging his patients to take illegal drugs and join nude workshops is continuing to practise despite being suspended by the official regulators.

A young man who rose from an inner-city background to become a youth worker and a promising horse rider has been shot dead, the 17th teenager to be murdered in the capital this year.

The government says it is making dementia a top priority as it calls on experts to find ways to reduce its spiralling burden on society. There are 560,000 people with dementia in England, each costing the economy £25,391 every year.

The number of patients leaving Health Service hospitals suffering from malnourishment has risen by two-thirds in the past five years.

The current child protection system is still not working effectively, an expert has said. Mark Williams-Thomas said a national computer network will not be working fully until 2010, and people can still get around criminal record checks.

{mosimage}His comments come on the fifth anniversary of the abduction of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in Soham.

The Home Office said the computer system could bring benefits by 2009 and criminal checks are “highly accurate”.

Mr Williams-Thomas, a former police detective who runs a child protection consultancy, has spent 15 years in the field, including working on the Sarah Payne and Jonathan King inquiries. He said the computer network allowing material to be shared between police forces is running three years late.

The development was one of the recommendations of the Bichard Inquiry, set up to investigate how Ian Huntley secured a job as a school caretaker despite a string of sex allegations against him.

A former boarding school teacher is facing jail after being convicted of committing 13 sexual offences against children in Devon.

Patient care is being compromised due to low staffing levels of mental health nurses according to a new survey from the Royal College of Nursing (RCN).

An osteopath has been found guilty of sexually assaulting an undercover policewoman who posed as a patient.