There were tears from members of the public after health officials confirmed plans to make significant cuts to mental health and learning disability services. At a meeting yesterday, the board of the new Northamptonshire Primary Care Trust approved changes to save £2.7m and help balance the trust’s books.

The South London Press campaign calling for the Maudsley Hospital emergency clinic to be saved this week has won the backing of a leading mental health charity and MPs. Marjorie Wallace,the chief executive of Sane,welcomed the campaign to save the service that can be a matter of life and death for people in mental crisis. MPs Simon Hughes and Harriet Harman have also pledged to take up the campaign at the highest level. They were among a group of MPs who met Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt this week to try to save the clinic.

Immigrants and the elderly are pushing up Cambridgeshire County Council’s costs, forcing it to make millions of pounds of cuts. Figures revealed to the Cambridge Evening News show the council is hoping to save £2.8 million from the environment and community services office which looks after roads, buses, adult support services and the environment. Among the proposed cuts is £1.3 million from adult social care, which includes reviewing the help vulnerable people receive.

Regions of the brain may not communicate with each other as efficiently as they should in people with autism, research suggests. US scientists used sophisticated scans to examine connections in the cerebral cortex – the part of the brain that deals with complex thought. They found evidence of abnormal patterns of brain cell connection in people with autism. The research was presented at a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.

NICE have published the first in a series of 5 commissioning guides to be published this autumn as part of a new set of products to help the NHS in England effectively commission evidence-based care for patients. Each of these web-based guides offers detailed practical support for commissioners on a specific clinical topic.

{mosimage}Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt has praised improvements in the NHS but warned organisations not to be complacent and to redouble their efforts to meet patients’ increasing expectations. Ms Hewitt also set out plans for tackling poor performance in a small minority of Trusts identified in the Healthcare Commission’s first ever Annual Health Check results. Responding to the results she said: “I want to congratulate the NHS for the hard work it has put in to improving performance. Millions of people are receiving high quality and safe services every day. The best of the NHS is amongst the best in the world and we should all be proud of its achievements. But I want to see the best everywhere. This is the toughest and most comprehensive assessment of the NHS and it takes forward the commitment we made to patients and the public to provide them with detailed and easily understandable information about the performance of their local health services.

A district councillor has criticised planning colleagues for approving an extension of a Donington care home when they did not have the full case history. Coun Fred Fretwell said that South Holland District Council’s planners had “lost” a file relating to Matthew Flinders Residential Home but went on to give the plans the go-ahead. At a recent meeting of Donington Parish Council he claimed that the action was one of “bad practice” and said he would pursue it.

Carers of people with Alzheimer’s disease have attacked “outrageous” plans to move a day centre to another part of Hull. Hull Council wants to move people who use the day centre in Bellfield Avenue in east Hull, to the Fernleigh centre, on Waterloo Street, in west Hull. The council say they can no longer use Bellfield as it also houses a residential unit for children.

{mosimage}A powerful committee of MPs and Peers is urging the Government to tackle the “extremely worrying” growth of people trafficking into the UK. Unpublished Government research shows there were an estimated 4,000 victims of trafficking for prostitution in 2003 at any one time, according to an inquiry report published by the Joint Committee on Human Rights. No reliable estimates exist for the number of children or adult men who have been trafficked into the country for labour exploitation purposes. The MPs and peers describe the problem as “one of the most serious human rights issues in the modern world” and call for action. Their report highlights confusion over official statistics which they say give widely varying figures. In 2000 Home Office figures gave a range of between 142 and 1,420 women trafficked into the UK in 1998.

Young care leavers with interests in poetry, rap, art and film making will show their achievements at Tate Britain in a special event to mark the start of National Care Leavers Week 2006. Taking place in the main hall of Tate Britain between from 7pm on 23 October, Futures will give those with an interest in looked after children and care leavers an opportunity to celebrate the potential of young people with care experience. The young people performing are from areas across England and Wales including Derbyshire, Anglesey, Bexley, Redcar, Hillingdon and Lancashire.