When care services minister Ivan Lewis recently admitted that the government was ‘failing’ people with dementia and their carers, he acknowledged what many nurses already knew to be tragic fact.

Councils need to take the lead in attracting investment to social care services that meet people’s present and future needs, according to a new report entitled ‘Safe as Houses? What drives investment in social care?’

Children’s Secretary Ed Balls is to urge schools to teach teenagers how to handle their emotions as part of a drive to improve behaviour and has promised £14 million over four years to extend the social and emotional aspects of learning programme (Seal) running in primary schools into secondaries.

The family of a grandmother who fell and died after being left unattended at a nursing home was furious after being sent a £1,200 bill for her care. Dementia sufferer Olive Hitchings, 85, tumbled from her wheelchair and broke her leg just ten days after moving into the nursing home.

{mosimage}Riversway Nursing Home in Bristol was accused of ‘nelgect’ by council investigators and her family say she should not have been left alone and should have been belted into her chair to stop her standing up.

Her outraged son Anthony, 59, said he was disgusted the home is charging them, despite being at fault. Anthony, from Kingswood, Bristol, said: “They’ll get the money over my dead body. “It’s a pretty bitter pill to swallow because if this accident hadn’t taken place, my mother would probably still be alive today.

“I’m not going to phone and ask them to waive the payment – people need to know what happened at the home. I shouldn’t have to ring them because they neglected my mother. It’s not about the fact of having the money, because that is available to us.”

Olive, a former cleaner and bookmakers’ employee, moved to the home in early April following an 11-week spell in Frenchay Hospital in Bristol. Her family say she lost had her mobility and was forced to use a wheelchair.

She suffered the fall ten days later and was taken back to Frenchay Hospital, where she died two days later. The 66-bed nursing home was warned to make improvements to its practices after a meeting held to investigate the complaints. The meeting was attended by Riversway manager Angela Glover; Jill Cornelius, an inspector for the Commission for Social Care Inspection (CSCI) and Kate Spreadbury, Bristol City Council’s safeguarding adults co-ordinator.

The quality of Dorset’s mental health services was revealed in a new survey. The Healthcare Comm-ission asked NHS users about their experiences as part of a national survey. It covered such areas as treatment, relationship with psychiatrists and out-of-hours care.

Children with asthma are missing out on the best drug treatment for their disease, because family doctors are ignoring prescribing guidelines, suggests research published ahead of print in the Archives of Disease in Childhood.

A report into the death of the youngest person to die in custody has called for sweeping changes to how children are dealt with in the youth justice system. Adam Rickwood, 14, hanged himself at Hassockfield Secure Training Centre (STC) in County Durham in 2004.

Community mental health services are getting better, a survey from the health watchdog suggests. But access to counselling and support for carers is still poor, the Healthcare Commission warned. A survey of 16,000 patients highlighted a “worrying” lack of progress in helping people with mental illness access benefits or get work.

{mosimage}Mental health leaders admitted there were still problems with services but they were working to improve things. Overall, 76% felt the services they received were “good”, “very good” or “excellent”. Relationships between psychiatrists and their patients appear to be improving with steady year-on-year increases in the proportion of patients who believed they were listened to and respected.

And more people with complex mental health problems know who their care co-ordinator is and are being offered copies of their care plan. More people had a care review in the past 12 months than had been reported in the last annual survey. But in some areas there is still a lot of work to be done, the findings from 69 trusts suggested.

Half of patients still have no access to telephone-based out-of-hours crisis care. And more than one in three patients who wanted counselling say they did not get it. The figures also indicated a lack of progress in helping people with mental health problems access benefits with almost a third of those who wanted help not receiving it.

Anna Walker, Chief Executive of the Healthcare Commission, said: “The general trends are encouraging, particularly given that many trusts are still getting to grips with providing care to service users within their own communities. But this shouldn’t disguise the problems – problems that have been going on for too long.

The European Commission has been asked to investigate whether a local health authority can refuse to pay for drugs when funding is available elsewhere. Tory MEP Chris Heaton-Harris claims the so-called NHS post-code lottery breaks European anti-discrimination laws.

The government has admitted for the first time that almost half of all children will be dangerously overweight by 2050 if drastic action is not taken to halt the growth in childhood obesity.