The Commission for Social Care Inspection plans changes to the way in which it assesses councils on the quality of social care services for adults.The primary aim is to tailor services to meet people’s needs, rather than fit people into the system. This is a key objective of the Government’s recent White Paper on health and social care, Our Health, Our Care, Our Say.

A £300m programme to tackle England’s epidemic of sexually transmitted infections is in danger of collapse because the money has been siphoned off by NHS trusts to reduce their financial deficits, government advisers warn today. The Independent Advisory Group on Sexual Health and HIV (IAG) said it surveyed 191 primary care trusts – the local bodies that hold the NHS purse strings -and found only 30 were spending the money as ministers intended. The rest have diverted some or all of it to cut overspending on hospitals, drugs and GP services.

The country’s first emergency mental health unit is to be set up in Manchester under plans to transform the city’s over-stretched services. The new unit will be run alongside the accident and emergency department at Manchester Royal Infirmary and will cater for patients suffering from the most serious mental health crises, including schizophrenia, self-harm and depression.

Children and young people say that boarding school placements can be good for them if they need to live away from home, in a report published by the Office of the Children’s Rights Director yesterday. The report focuses primarily on the views of children and young people who live in boarding schools because they need to live away from home for a variety of reasons.

Public service union Unison is to mount a campaign calling on employers in the social care sector pay their workers’ fees to register with the General Social Care Council (GSCC). The move came after it emerged that half of the employers that responded to a consultation on the issue said they would not pay registration fees on behalf of their staff.

Lewisham Council is piloting electronic records so that departments can share information about the people who use multiple local authority services. The London borough council’s older adults and hospital teams provide services to the same people, but they work in different locations and have built up two different sets of social care records. The adoption services team at Lewisham Council is also piloting social care records that run on an underlying electronic document management system.

Technicians are trying to solve a computer failure that has prevented 80 NHS trusts gaining access to patients’ records and admissions since Sunday.Eight major hospitals and more than 70 primary care trusts in north-west England and the West Midlands were hit. The failure means staff have to log patient movements manually, but no clinical information has been affected. A spokesman at University Hospital, Birmingham, said they hoped to have the system back up by Tuesday afternoon.

A new study on disabled black people and employment has found that they are worse off than other people with disabilities and that disability organisations are failing to acknowledge the racial disadvantage they suffer. The report: Ethnicity, Disability and Work, commissioned by the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB) which included interviews with 28 people of African origin and 20 people of African Caribbean origin, shows that some black people feel that the political agenda of disabled organisations tend to give their concerns a very low priority and consequently voluntary and community organisations are not seen as being particularly helpful in securing employment for disabled blacks.

An 86 year-old pensioner was left distraught and in tears after possessions were thrown in a skip by social services carers cleaning his home. A five-strong team came to Alec Watson’s home in Hallaway, Carlisle, on Thursday and threw out clothes, bedding, cutlery and toiletries. He was left with a plastic knife, fork and spoon to eat with and spent the night in a sleeping bag because his duvet was in the skip. But Cumbria social services said Mr Watson agreed to his possessions being thrown out and that the matter had been discussed fully with his social worker.

Mental health staff have been invited to apply for voluntary redundancy in a bid to shed around 40 posts. A month-long staff consultation, which will be extended to include a staff council meeting, was agreed by the board of Norfolk and Waveney Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust. Although the Trust has a history of financial stability, it needs to spend about £5m less than it expected to this year, after its commissioning Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) reduced the amount of money the Trust needs to provide services.