Recruitment failures are wrecking plans to look after more patients at home, it is claimed. Ministers had promised to take on 3,000 community matrons by March but only 1,200 are thought to have started work so far.

{mosimage}Yet Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt has said that more of the chronically ill will be cared for at home as community hospitals are shut down.

At least 105 of the hospitals are under threat of closure as health trust bosses try to turn around their debts.

The idea of looking after more patients at home was put forward in the NHS Improvement Plan of 2004.

It called for community matrons to look after those with chronic conditions such as diabetes and asthma and so avoid the need for hospital treatment.

Lynn Young, of the Royal College of Nursing, said budget cuts were jeopardising the initiative.

Community matrons are really just the tip of the iceberg,’ she said. The policy is to do more in the community but district nurse and health visitor courses are being slashed.

Children with learning difficulties and disabilities are to get specialist help closer to home in a radical overhaul of education. The final proposals to revamp special educational needs in Norfolk are aimed at creating an equal spread of schools and resources so children do not have to travel so far to access help.

A couple who have dedicated their lives to fostering children have both been honoured in the New Year’s Honours List. Joseph Lansdell, 61, and wife Rita, 62, from Pound Hill, have looked after 42 children in 36 years of fostering.

Abuse of vulnerable adults in Suffolk has more than tripled in the last four years – and care bosses believe the figures are only the tip of the iceberg. Charities and disability rights campaigners have raised concerns about the trend and called for such abuse to be taken more seriously after it emerged cases in the county have soared by 269% in three years.

New figures have shown that some of Norfolk’s care homes continue to offer a poor level of service to residents. Assessments carried out by the Commission for Social Care Inspection revealed that out of the 389 care homes in Norfolk as of December 2006, 28 received the lowest level of grading, which indicated they were “poor”.

A leading pensioners’ charity has slammed social services for failing to respond to an SOS call regarding a seriously ill 85-year-old. Help the Aged says it would expect the organisation to make every attempt to contact an elderly person in need.

Thousands of elderly people who have sold their homes to pay for their care could get refunds after one family got back £50,000. Mike Pearce had funded his mother’s care for more than three years before the ombudsman ordered the repayment. 

The NHS is “on track” to break even within three months but jobs will be cut, the health secretary has said. Patricia Hewitt did not specify how many redundancies there would be, but said reports of 18,000 job losses this year was a “statistical projection”.

{mosimage}However, there would “some reduction” in jobs for administrators, although staff retiring or moving to other areas could account for some of the decrease. The NHS ended the financial year 2005-06 more than £500m overdrawn.

Ms Hewitt said she was “confident” of the NHS balancing its books. “I have made it clear that we do need to get the NHS back into financial balance by the end of March,” she said. “We are on track to do that and I am confident we will. The important thing is that over the last 10 years the NHS has taken on over 300,000 more staff,” Ms Hewitt said.

Labour’s 2005 manifesto promised that managerial overheads would be cut. However, she said the 18,000 figure was “not people losing their jobs”, but people retiring or moving jobs.

“What is happening is that as some people retire or move jobs those jobs aren’t being filled because as the NHS becomes more efficient… you can actually treat more people and treat them faster with fewer staff and fewer beds than you needed in the old days,” she told Sky News.

UK scientists planning to mix human and animal cells in order to research cures for degenerative diseases fear their work will be halted. They accuse the body that grants licences for embryo research, the HFEA, of bowing to government pressure if it fails to consider their applications.

Thousands more women could benefit from the life-saving breast cancer drug, Herceptin, at no increased cost to the NHS, by reducing the dose and duration of treatment, researchers suggest.