A great-grandmother faces blindness because the NHS will not pay for a sight-saving drug. Lillian Driscoll has already spent her savings paying for a series of injections, but she may need more treatment to prevent her eyesight deteriorating further.
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Britain’s couch potato tendency is costing the NHS £1bn a year as diseases linked to physical inactivity rise, according to research published today. Our sluggishness causes both disease and death, says the report by experts at Oxford University’s department of public health.
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The battle over whether council houses should remain in local authority ownership has led to allegations of blatant misrepresentation as tenants vote on the issue in Wales’ second city. Mick Bennett, the director of Community Housing Cymru, the umbrella body for housing associations, said he was appalled at claims made in leaflets distributed in Swansea.
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The Department for Education and Skills has finally announced that Ofsted will be the body that must be informed of any safeguarding reviews. There had been confusion over who would take over the role when the responsibility for the inspection of children’s social services is switched from the Commission for Social Care Inspection to Ofsted on 1 April.
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Out-of-hours doctors in Wales can now access patients’ health records online. It is hoped the initiative, developed by Informing Healthcare, will improve the care patients receive outside of normal working hours.
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Hell families can cost taxpayers up to £250,000 a year. A hard core of 140,000 poor households are responsible for huge amounts of crime and antisocial behaviour, a damning government report discloses today.
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A nurse who said she abhorred violence wept yesterday as she was cleared of orchestrating a “mass brawl” by a pack of Wolves fans in London’s West End. CCTV footage allegedly captured Claire Evans, 38, who lives in Cwmbran, “encouraging and directing” up to 20 fellow football supporters to charge a small group of pub-goers.
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New Government data released today reveals the true picture about socially excluded families. It shows that over 140,000 families are at risk, suffering five or more indicators of social exclusion and need more family-tailored support packages at ‘critical moments’.
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A database of knife crime is to be set up by the Home Office in the wake of a series of horrific murders. Home Secretary John Reid announced the move yesterday amid rising concern about knife attacks and teenagers carrying weapons.
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Campaigners urged Gordon Brown today to use his 11th and last budget to put the government back on track to meet its target of halving child poverty by 2010. In a letter to the chancellor, the Child Poverty Action Group said it was time for a “different and more radical approach”, after the government missed its interim target of reducing the number of children in poverty by 1 million by 2005.
{mosimage}Tomorrow’s budget comes in the wake of a report by the United Nations’ organisation for children, Unicef, which placed Britain bottom in a league table of the wellbeing of children in 21 rich-world countries. And it comes after the Freud Review recommended new measures to encourage single parents to work, including requiring them to look for jobs when their youngest child reached 12, rather than 16 as at present. In her letter to the chancellor, the CPAG chief executive, Kate Green, dismissed the Freud Report as “an ill thought-out response to complex problems”.
She urged Mr Brown to “prioritise strategies that support and do not penalise parents, protect families who are unable to access employment and ensure that people who move into work access sustainable, well-remunerated jobs that lift them from poverty”.
Figures released last year suggested that 3.4 million children are living in households below the official poverty line of 60% of Britain’s median (average) level of household income, when housing costs are taken into account.
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