Help the Aged today announces that it is funding 20 new studies across the UK through its biomedical Research into Ageing programme. The studies, totalling £1.7m in value, will research treatments and solutions to bring better health and independence to older people.

Chancellor Gordon Brown has told MPs that nurses and other public sector workers will get below inflation pay awards, sparking anger from unions. Mr Brown said he had accepted pay review body recommendations that awards be kept within the government’s 2% inflation target.

The Commission for Social Care Inspection (CSCI), the regulator for social care in England, has today responded to the Government’s consultation document, “The future regulation of health and adult social care in England”.

Overflowing bins, unhygienic kitchens and out-of-date medical records were just some of the discoveries made at care homes in Mole Valley last year. Inspections carried out by the Commission for Social Care uncovered alarming problems at residential homes for the elderly and disabled members of the community.

Doctors are missing vital signs that mothers are depressed and at risk of harming themselves or their babies, experts have warned. An estimated one in seven women experience mental health problems either before giving birth or in the year after.

A youth club supervisor in charge of a group of children who were left in the dark on a trip to Northern Ireland has been suspended. Paul Walling, one of the youngsters dropped off by youth leaders in the middle of nowhere.

Towering achievements cast long shadows, and it is society’s extraordinary success in extending life that explains increasing dementia. As a new report from the London School of Economics explained yesterday, life-blighting loss of memory and mental faculties affects only a minority of older people, but the proportion increases for each successive age bracket, so that nearly one in four of the very oldest are affected.

A Conduct Committee of the General Social Care Council (GSCC) has decided the case of a social worker from Southampton who was alleged to have breached the code of practice for social care workers by sending and receiving several emails from his work email account containing offensive, discriminatory and obscene content.

In an upstairs meeting room in a York hotel, 10 young people are picking through final amendments to a document they have spent months compiling. They chew for a while on one headline phrase, which calls on local authorities to implement “a style of leadership that champions and promotes the involvement of children and young people at all levels”.

The first homecare workers will be added to social care’s expanding professional register early next year. A good thing, most people agree, but there will be concerns about workers being scapegoated for failings in what is an underfunded and often poorly-managed service.