NHS reforms harm patient care and ministers are making fraudulent claims about their impact, a doctor says. General surgeon David Flook accused the government of “incompetent” handling of the health service and called for more doctor-led management. He said fast-track cancer referral pushed the “worried well” to the front instead of those most at risk, the British Medical Journal reported. But the government said it had devolved power and made many improvements.

Unwitting pensioners who take up council grants may find that their carer has a claim on their estate at death. This is the worry of one councillor. As Bedfordshire on Sunday reported last week, a grant system run by Bedfordshire County Council means that elderly recipients are unknowingly becoming the employers of their own carers.

There is a cycle familiar to anyone who cares for someone suffering from an acute mental illness. Patients experience terrifying symptoms: hallucinations, paranoia, delusions. They become unable to look after themselves and are ‘sectioned’, meaning compulsory detention and treatment. Once given anti-psychotic drugs, their condition improves.

Ministers are facing the prospect of an embarrassing defeat over plans to introduce tough new mental health laws, as the leading charities and opposition MPs this weekend threatened to use full scrutiny powers to de-rail the plans. On Tuesday MPs will debate proposals to introduce powers of compulsory community treatment for patients who have stopped taking their medication. The plans follow revelations last week of repeated failures in the mental care of John Barrett, the man who murdered a stranger in Richmond Park, London.

The Government will publish controversial plans regarding the treatment of people with mental health problems. The Mental Health Bill was scrapped in March amid protests about its content but is now being reintroduced in an amended form.

One in three babies is conceived by mistake, the result of missed pills and split condoms, according to a large-scale study which questions whether women have the control over their lives that modern contraception promised them.