With Easter just a few days away, The Stroke Association has good news for all chocolate lovers – a few squares of dark chocolate can help to reduce the risk of stroke.

Vulnerable patients could ‘slip through the net’ if district nursing numbers continue to fall, nursing unions have claimed. The warning comes in light of a Local Government Association survey of 95 councils, which revealed more than one in five had seen a reduction in district nursing capacity.

Social services chiefs last night insisted that home care support for thousands of elderly people is not being run down ahead of controversial privatisation plans.

Seventeen deaths at a hospital in Norfolk have been linked with an outbreak of a virulent strain of the superbug Clostridium difficile.

The chairman of the Healthcare Commission has called for the mandatory recording of the ethnicity of all patients using mental health and learning disability services.

The rise in the number of elderly people is set to create a major demand for care services. North Yorkshire County Council has said older people made up 18% of the population on its patch in 2001, but the figure is set to rise to 25% by 2020.

The head teacher of a Lancashire school has been sacked following allegations she employed a convicted sex offender to work on the school’s website. Kathleen Tyson, who has been the head at Holy Trinity Primary School in Darwen for two years, was suspended in January while an inquiry took place.

Improvements in technology could soon see aspects of social care being performed by robotics within a service user’s home, according to the British Computer Society (BCS).

The number of children aged 11 to 15 who smoked at least one cigarette a week has remained unchanged since 2003. And girls are more likely than boys to be smokers, the research claimed. Government targets aim to reduce smoking among this age group to 9% or less by 2010.

Bedfordshire-based MacIntyre Housing Association has taken over the management of eight small, staffed homes for people with learning disabilities from Buckinghamshire County Council and Buckinghamshire Primary Care Trust.