Controversial plans to close a Lymington old people’s home have been described as “cruel” by the town’s mayor.

Carers of people with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia have welcomed plans to create a specialist NHS centre.

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.

The number of people detained in secure psychiatric wards in England has reached a record high, figures show.

{mosimage}More than 3,500 were being detained in secure hospitals in July 2007, experts at the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health said.

They said the figures raised important questions about whether people were being detained appropriately. The government said the figures reflected their policy to make sure people were treated in the best place.

The report on Forensic Mental Health Services – which provides care for people who have come into contact with the criminal justice system before being transferred to the NHS – found a large increase in people in high- and medium-secure units over the past decade.

High-security units are for people who pose a serious danger to the public.

Between 1996 and 2007, the population of high- and medium-secure units rose by 45%. A more in-depth look at the figures showed the growth occurred overwhelmingly in medium-secure units.

The Sainsbury Centre also found that most people are admitted to secure hospitals from prison. About 40 people each quarter have to wait in prison for more than three months before transferring to a secure hospital.

Almost a quarter of care agencies fail to protect disabled and elderly people from thefts in their own homes by carers, the BBC has discovered.

Barnet Council is taking the company which runs its residential care homes to arbitration in an effort to stave off an £8million claim for tax payers’ money.

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.