A heated verbal jousting match has erupted following the decision to increase home care service charges.

A Scottish nurse who “didn’t like old people” murdered four elderly patients by injecting them with lethal doses of insulin, a court heard yesterday.

{mosimage}Colin Norris, from Glasgow, even predicted the time one woman would die, despite colleagues believing the pensioner was comfortable after hip surgery. The court heard that all four women died in the early hours when Norris was working, and they could all have been considered “a burden to nursing staff”. Norris was said to have told a colleague that one of his patients “was going off that night”, adding it was “just his luck” that she should die in the night, as he would “have all the paperwork to do”.

Three Vietnamese illegal immigrants were each jailed for two years yesterday after helping to run a cannabis factory capable of producing up to £1 million worth of drugs every two months.

A Council has come under attack for asking care providers to bid in an online auction for delivering services.

Day centres for disabled people were closed yesterday as hundreds of social care staff began an indefinite strike over pay and job cuts.

Scotland’s public service ombudsman was wrong to rule that a council was legally obliged to pay for the personal care of an elderly man, a judge ruled today.

A nurse appeared in court yesterday charged with murdering four elderly patients and the attempted murder of a fifth.

Fears of being falsely accused of harming children is the major factor preventing Scots from volunteering, and while 69% of adults consider working with children, only 5% actually do, a report claims today.

The chief executive of NHS 24 has quit less than two weeks after a sheriff ruled the death of a child could have been avoided.

An estimated 50 foreign care workers in Inverness may be forced to leave the country under threat of deportation following changes to national work permit rules.