Toddlers from disadvantaged families in York are to get free nursery places. Under a new initiative, free nursery places are to be given out to 500 two-year-olds in York. The Department for Education and Skills has given £622,000 to City of York Council to spend over the next two years.

There are dozens of people sleeping rough in Leeds but where are they? Graveyards, tunnels, bushes, derelict buildings and stairwells are just some of the places Leeds’ homeless are making their beds, according to a new survey. Few sleep in the city centre, but most of those featured in the study by Leeds Simon Community for Shelter were between friends’ sofas or the streets.

Commenting on reports published by the Department of Health on the need to change how emergency care in England is provided, Dr Jonathan Fielden, Chairman of the BMA’s consultants’ committee said: “Doctors want to ensure that as medicine advances patients have access to high quality, safe care based on the best available evidence. Where the Government and NHS managers are also party to this patient centred agenda we will work with them.

A pioneering scheme to help older people in West Sussex stay in their own homes while giving key workers and other professionals a place to live is being launched. The project, called Homeshare, will put older people in touch with responsible professionals, after thorough checks. They get free accommodation in exchange for helping around the house with tasks such as gardening, cooking and cleaning.

Less than a third of the extra money poured into the NHS last year was spent on improvements to patient services, according to Health Department figures obtained by the Daily Mail. Almost half the £5.5 billion of taxpayers money that was added to the health service budget in 2005/6 went on higher salaries for existing medical and managerial staff and a further 16 per cent on increased charges for existing drugs.

The tragic scale of failures in the mental health system is to be revealed in a new report showing that one person a week in Britain is killed by a psychiatric patient who has been assessed as being low risk, often only days before. A culture of ‘desensitisation’, in which psychiatric staff become used to dealing with very high-risk patients and so fail to notice the warning signs when one is becoming dangerously ill, lies at the heart of the problem, according to the results of the independent inquiry chaired by the mental health ‘tsar’, Professor Louis Appleby.

Health Minister Rosie Winterton has conceded there are problems in the system for treating the mentally ill. She was speaking on the eve of a report expected to show that, on average, one person a week dies at the hands of a mentally ill patient. The report will say almost a third of the killings were by people judged to have been of “low risk”.

Giving care home staff flu jabs can cut the number of illnesses and deaths among residents, a study has shown. The practice makes a significant difference when flu rates are high, researchers from University College London said.

{mosimage}Writing in the British Medical Journal, they said staff would be the main way flu was introduced into care homes. A Department of Health spokesman said he hoped the study would encourage homes to offer the vaccine to staff. Elderly people living in nursing and residential homes are likely to have weakened immune systems, leaving them vulnerable to flu outbreaks even when they have been vaccinated.

Many countries offer flu jabs to healthcare workers every year, but in the UK most care homes do not vaccinate their staff. The research, funded by the Department of Health, looked at 44 UK care homes during the winters of 2003-4 and 2004-5.

East Sussex County Council has welcomed the results of the latest Government assessment of its adult social care services. Although the rating – one out of a possible three stars – is the same as that given last year by the Commission for Social Care Inspection (CSCI), the inspectorate acknowledged the council’s radical ‘Three Year Plan’ for improvement as the beginning of a period of significant progress.

The academic who designed the Government’s race equality policy on mental health has resigned over fears that not enough is being done to protect ethnic minorities from mistreatment and discrimination.Lord Patel of Bradford has told ministers he intends to step down as director of the Department of Health’s ethnic minority mental health programme because the “scandal” of the treatment of black patients has not been dealt with.