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.

The health of Gypsies and Travellers is significantly worse than that of other vulnerable groups, reveals research in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. It is not known how many Gypsies and Travellers there are in Britain, but estimates put the number at around 300,000.

A consortium of the UK’s biggest alcohol companies is backing a £12m marketing initiative to promote responsible drinking among consumers. The companies, which include John Smith’s-owner Scottish & Newcastle, Diageo, Carlsberg and Stella Artois-parent Inbev, are funding the initiative as members of industry body the Portman Group.

The government has pledged an extra million pounds to help the charity sector tackle exploitation by terrorists as it sharpens efforts to tackle money laundering and financial crime.

Denying drug treatment to thousands of Alzheimer’s sufferers is an “incomprehensible and illogical” decision, the most eminent experts in the field have said.

Nearly one in five children’s hospitals are not providing around-the-clock, emergency life-support cover, a watchdog says. The Healthcare Commission also found a number of other “serious concerns” in a review of 157 NHS trusts.

{mosimage}The watchdog said one in 10 surgeons was not operating enough to maintain their skills and 75% of trusts were classed as fair or weak overall. The government said improvements had been made, but more was still needed. The Commission has been working with the bottom 10% of trusts, which include the eight trusts ranked as weak – Brighton and Sussex, County Durham and Darlington, Kettering General, Mid Staffordshire General, North Devon Healthcare, Salisbury Healthcare, Scarborough and North East Yorkshire and Stockport.

The study into children’s hospitals and those with specific children’s services found that  just 16% of paediatric inpatient units did not carry out enough work to reach the minimum recommended professional level.

Inspectors also found only 58% of services had adequate child protection standards in place, while only a quarter of nurses and less than 10% of surgeons and anaesthetists had the right training in how to communicate with children.