Thousands of shops, restaurants and cafés will be forced to register their staff with a new child protection agency and have their criminal records checked if they employ children for weekend or summer holiday work.

Out-of-hours provision in the NHS is now so complex that it is hard for patients to know who they should call and where to go, according to a report.

More than a quarter of the UK’s student nurses dropped out of their courses in 2006, figures suggest.

Less than half of NHS staff believe patient care is the top priority for trusts, an annual staff survey shows.

Alan Johnson, the health secretary, appeared yesterday to have averted the threat of industrial action across the NHS in England with a pay offer for 1.2 million nurses and ancillary staff worth almost 8% over three years.

An experienced social care worker was stabbed to death yesterday while visiting a client at a “care in the community” home which has won praise from neighbours in a quiet city suburb.

Philip Ellison, 47 and married with three sons, died on a routine visit to the house in Fulwood, north Preston, which Lancashire county council rents to provide homes for people with long-term psychiatric problems.

Specially trained detectives this morning start questioning a 51-year-old man who was arrested at the house. Ellison, of Penwortham, Preston, was found in the two-storey property bleeding from a number of stab wounds and was taken to the nearby hospital, where he died shortly afterwards.

Neighbours in the cul-de-sac, Glebe Close, a housing association development in the grounds of a former hospital, said that three police vehicles had blocked off the house shortly before midday. Mark Rigby, 38, whose house overlooks the property said he was working on his computer and looked up to see another neighbour coming away from the house.

A social care worker has been stabbed to death while visiting a house in Lancashire. Police were called to Fulwood, Preston, on Monday morning after reports of a knife attack.

The Home Secretary Jacqui Smith is launching a new body which will have responsibility for policing the country’s borders.

The UK Border Agency merges the work of 25,000 immigration, revenue and customs and visa staff.  Critics say its creation is just a re-branding exercise, since the new agency will have no new powers.

A Home Office spokesman said: “The new agency will be the eyes and ears of the police at the border.”

The UKBA’s 25,000 staff previously worked in the Border and Immigration Agency, HM Revenue and Customs and UK Visas, which all merged to form the new agency.

UKBA will work to combat smuggling, immigration crime and border tax fraud.

If you can’t stop playing computer games, be careful. Doctors say it could give you the same highly negative character traits associated with a form of autism.

VOLUNTARY and community care organisations in South Yorkshire are set to benefit from a £17million pot of Government grants.