The Met Office Health Forecasting Team has won the Innovative Services Award at the prestigious Health and Social Care Awards 2006. The award recognises an innovative new or improved service that is benefiting the delivery of healthcare for patients, users and carers.

A recent report suggests that elderly and disabled people are increasingly relying on family and friends to care for them and are being excluded from social care.

Numbers of children being taken under the wing of care workers after suffering significant harm have risen in the county. A total of 283 youngsters – predominantly aged under five – were the subject of new care proceedings in court in 2006, compared to 241 in the previous year.

Tony Blair tried yesterday to patch the cracks in his Cabinet over the Government’s policies on marriage and single parents as he defended its record on tackling poverty.

The National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) has published guidance which is the first of its kind to make specific recommendations on the identification, treatment and management of all mental health disorders in antenatal and postnatal women.

Rioting has broken out for the second time in three days at a young offenders’ institute. A police spokesman said trouble at Deerbolt young offenders’ institute in County Durham was brought under control in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

Donald Hoodless, chair of the national adult social care workforce development body Skills for Care, has made a hard-hitting call for a “one stop shop” system of social care workforce development funding through the Sector Skills Council.

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.