A Government minister has called for a new culture in the care system to tackle abuse and neglect of the elderly. Care services minister Ivan Lewis said society needed to be as outraged by the abuse of an old person as by the abuse of a child.

{mosimage}His comments came as a new telephone hotline was launched in conjunction with care homes themselves to enable people to complain without worrying about repurcussions.

advertisementIt is intended to give elderly residents, families, friends and care workers a safe and protected way of speaking out, knowing there is an independent charity overseeing the process.

The phoneline involves a number of organisations including the major elder abuse charity in the UK, Action on Elder Abuse, the police, and the biggest care provider in the UK, Southern Cross Healthcare, which has 710 care homes in the UK. It will be run by Essex County Council.

At present nearly a quarter of calls to the charity Action on Elder Abuse are about abuse in care homes, where only 4.9 per cent of older people live.

Ministers were today urged to investigate the slaying of mental health charity worker Ashleigh Ewing.

As devoted foster parents, Vincent and Pauline Matherick have provided a stable family home for almost 30 vulnerable children.

Children as young as eight are to be protected from online sexual abuse in a new initiative by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP).

As many as one in twenty people sees child sexual abuse images while surfing the internet, with more than a third of all sites showing the most extreme images, according to a report published today.

We constantly hear reports of poor quality social care in the UK, but when Harry Ferguson’s mother was terminally ill he was astonished by the compassion and professionalism of her nurses and social workers

The General Social Care Council’s statement of roles and tasks is the first official report on social work in England for nearly a generation. The 1983 Barclay Report couldn’t reach agreement and was largely ignored.

London will lose nearly £420m for social services under a government funding proposal, according to the organisation London Councils.

{mosimage}It said the government was considering scrapping a protection called damping, which keeps funding above a set level.

It said the cut would hit provision for young adults in areas such as mental health and helping the disabled.

A government spokesperson said it was consulting on phasing out damping and a decision will be made later this year.

London Councils said the fall in funding would hit 90% of London’s 32 boroughs and would mean the city would receive funding for just 68% of its social care expenditure.

It claims a collection of authorities in the North West, West Midlands and Yorkshire and Humber that are set to benefit from the scrapping of damping, were putting pressure on government to remove it.

London Councils chairman, Councillor Merrick Cockell, said: ‘If the government bows down to pressure and applies the raw funding formula without funding protection, it could have serious long-term implications for the future provision of social services for vulnerable adults throughout the capital.”

A young mental health worker was stabbed to death with four knives by a patient who had been freed from a psychiatric hospital after threatening to murder the Queen.

{mosimage}Ashleigh Ewing, 22, was on a routine visit to the home of Ronald Dixon, who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, when he launched an attack that left her with 39 stab wounds.

Dixon, 35, thought that he was the son of Henry VIII and had been arrested at Buckingham Palace four months earlier, when he told police that he wanted to see his mother – the Queen – and planned to kill her.

He was treated at a psychiatric hospital in January last year, but by May he had been allowed to return to his home in Heaton, Newcastle upon Tyne.

The Metropolitan Police had taken his threats on the Queen’s life seriously enough to order checks on his whereabouts before she visited the North East in April.

Ms Ewing, who was sent to Dixon’s flat to deliver a letter, was six months into her first full-time job after graduating from Northumbria University.

She was employed as a support worker by Mental Health Matters, a charity that provides community services to clients with psychiatric problems and that managed the property where Dixon was living.

Newcastle Crown Court was told that Dixon, who called himself King Ron, had been refusing to take antipsychotic drugs, was drinking alcohol and had become distressed by mounting debts. He was showing signs of a relapse into a psychotic state.