Next year will see more pensioners in the UK than children and ever more people will be facing up to huge bills for the cost of continuing care of the elderly.

Care services have been accused of systematic failures following the death of a 10-year-old Bristol child who suffered years of chronic neglect. Professionals “missed opportunities” to intervene before the girl had an epileptic fit and fell in a bath of scalding water, a child safety panel concluded.

{mosimage}Bristol’s Safeguarding Children Board condemned health, education and social care services for failing to communicate and underestimating neglect in the family. A catalogue of physical, racial and drug abuse in the family, over a 14-year period, had been collated by authorities. But a lack of “critical analysis” prevented workers recognising chronic neglect suffered by the girl and her seven siblings.

The board, led by police, health and children’s organisations, concluded: “Professionals failed to gauge the level of actual neglect being experienced by the children and consequently the view held by professionals was that the threshold for child protection intervention was not met.

“There were missed opportunities for professionals to intervene in the early years, which could have focused upon parenting support. There was a lack of critical analysis of known information with incidents being treated discretely in isolation from each other, which contributed to an underestimate of the amount of neglect that the children in the family were experiencing.”

A £690,000 funding boost for communities in St Helens will help local people to lead more physically and mentally fit lifestyles. The funding is the St. Helens share of Target: Well-being, managed by Groundwork, which is an £8.9m major new regional programme awarded by the Big Lottery Fund.

A number of cancer patients denied a new drug by the NHS may get free treatment as part of a clinical trial taking place in Manchester. The drug Sutent can in some cases prolong the lives of patients with kidney cancer.

Four people have been charged with ill treatment or neglect of residents at a Gloucester residential home which has been under investigation for more than two years. They are all due to face Gloucester Magistrates later this month, together with a representative of the company which runs the home.

Smokers are twice as likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia as nonsmokers, doctors have warned. More than 700,000 Brits have dementia – of whom two thirds have Alzheimer’s. But by 2025, that number is set to rise to more than a million.