Children and families who have regular contact with social workers can expect higher standards of care and better communication thanks to a new set of promises from council chiefs.

Three care home workers who encouraged residents to fight and racially abuse each other were jailed for six months each today. Over the course of a year the three systematically preyed on the mentally and physically vulnerable, London’s Snaresbrook Crown Court heard.

{mosimage}Eulalee Hall, 51, from Highbury, 31-year-old Noleen Bailey, from Haringey, and Glendeen Nedd, 36, of Walthamstow, variously admitted six counts of ill-treating patients and one of wilful neglect.

The three were arrested after their “humiliating” treatment of residents was secretly filmed on a mobile phone by a colleague.

Passing sentence, Judge Alan Pardoe QC told the trio that those under their care needed to be looked after with ‘skill and dedication’. “There can be no excuse for the verbal abuse of the mentally disabled, still less the cruel ill-treatment of them,” the judge said.

The court heard that the now closed Medina Road residential care home in Holloway, north London, was run by Craegmoor plc for Islington and Camden council. Its lone male patient was never targeted, but care for the three women residents was a different matter.

Janine Sheff, prosecuting, showed the court some of the mobile phone footage. In one clip, Hall could be seen encouraging a Down’s syndrome sufferer to kick a deaf and autistic patient. The barrister said separate video footage pictured Bailey and Nedd laughing hysterically as they encouraged the Down’s syndrome sufferer to call the third woman resident they were supposed to be looking after a “white bitch”.

A care home at the centre of a police investigation into allegations that residents were poisoned has been ordered to close, it has been revealed. Rachel and Leigh Baker, who run Parkfields residential care home in Butleigh, Somerset, were arrested following the death of Lucy Cox, 97, on New Year’s Day.

Physical inactivity costs the UK health service in excess of £1 billion every year, suggests research in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

A high-level council report into the care of the elderly and their possessions has admitted ‘weaknesses’ in the system – but claims the overall procedures are sound, and stops short of calling in police.

A social worker and a mental health patient were found tied up and stabbed to death in a flat yesterday. Cops discovered the bloody scene when local authority officials reported the social worker missing.

The police are to set up “retail jails” on high streets and in busy shopping malls to detain yobs and other offenders for up to four hours under Home Office proposals published yesterday.

In almost everyone’s life there will come a point when they need support and help with every day living. The ravages of old age, physical or mental disability in both adults and children, mean hundreds of carers across Wearside are needed each day to make sure there is always someone on hand.

Social care workers across the Reading area have been attacked on an astonishing 379 occasions since January 2005. A Reading Chronicle investigation has revealed that on average one person is attacked every day while doing their job.

Payment by Results (PbR), the funding system for a significant portion of NHS care in England, must adapt and change if it is to improve patient care, says the Chairman of the BMA’s Consultants’ Committee, Dr Jonathan Fielden, when responding to the consultation on PbR1, launched today (15 March 2007).