The last council-run care home in Bolton could close early next year – and be replaced by flats for the elderly. Adult Services chiefs are putting the finishing touches to a bid for a slice of £40 million allocated by the Government to finance extra care housing schemes. If the Bolton bid is successful, it would see Manor Court residential care home, in Harwood, Bolton, demolished to make way for 37 sheltered flats. Each would provide residents with two-bedroomed accommodation, with the benefit of having their care needs met in their homes.

The axe has fallen on mental health services in Cambridgeshire after Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt chose to back £3 million cuts. Her decision has been blasted by councillors and campaigners who have opposed the savage cutbacks proposed by Cambridge City and South Cambridgeshire Primary Care Trusts – but to no avail. After months of deliberation, Mrs Hewitt finally handed down her decision and announced the Government will let the reductions to the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Mental Health Partnership Trust’s services go ahead.

{mosimage}Children’s charity the NSPCC has launched a television advertising campaign to encourage people to act against child cruelty by donating time or money. The commercials, developed by Saatchi & Saatchi, includes two TV commercials called “Caravan” and “Marathon”. The first ad, which features a violent mother and complacent father, aims to raise awareness of the fact that every month the NSPCC needs 2,000 volunteers for its ChildLine service.

The second spot, which features a young girl who is terrified when her father enters her room at night, pushes the message that the charity needs to raise £7m a month through fundraising and donations.

Ten thousand previously inadequate childcare places for children are now satisfactory or better as a result of Ofsted inspection and intervention, according to a new report published by the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted). Making a difference: how Ofsted inspections improved inadequate care for children, reveals that the large majority of providers judged to be inadequate between April 2005 and June 2006 had improved by the time of their reinspections. Over those 15 months, 1,100 of the 32,000 providers inspected by Ofsted were judged to be inadequate (3%).

{mosimage} The NHS is preparing a wave of closures of key hospital departments across England in the run-up to the next general election, its new chief executive told the Guardian in his first interview since starting the job. David Nicholson, the man responsible for leading implementation of reforms, said there would be up to 60 “reconfigurations” of NHS services, affecting every strategic health authority in the land.

Some changes will try to squeeze out overcapacity that contributed to the NHS’s £512m deficit in the last financial year.But most will be aimed at redesigning the NHS to improve care by concentrating key services in fewer hospitals.

The home secretary, John Reid, has drawn up far-reaching plans to create “a true mixed economy” in the criminal justice system, including putting entire local probation services out for competition. A “privatisation prospectus” quietly drawn up by the home secretary envisages a five-year programme of “competitions” during which £9bn-worth of probation and prison services – a quarter of the total spent – are to be offered to the private security industry and voluntary organisations.

Children who live in overcrowded housing are up to 10 times more likely to contract meningitis, a report from the housing charity Shelter reveals. It has reviewed research into the effects of poor housing on children. The report warns children in bad housing have up to a 25% higher risk of severe ill-health and disability during childhood and early adulthood.

The government is making £50m available to help refurbish hospices as part of its push to improve palliative care. Marie Curie Cancer Care will receive £10m, with other hospices in England free to bid for a slice of the rest. Ministers said the cash could be used for existing services, but not to build new hospices, over the next two years.

Measures to tackle rising public health problems are being scrapped or postponed because the funds have not materialised, public health chiefs say. An extra £211m was to be ploughed into projects this year to tackle smoking, obesity and sexual health. But public health directors say just a fraction was coming through because of the deficits crisis and the push risked “never getting off the ground”.

Hospitals and GP surgeries face shortages of key medical equipment after NHS workers decided yesterday to stage the first national strikes in the health service since 1988. As anger increases over the policy of using private companies to provide NHS services, Unison, the public services union, announced that its members at NHS Logistics had voted by 74 per cent to strike over the £1.6 billion sale of their network to the German haulage firm DHL.