Social workers at Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council are responding more quickly to emergencies after introducing electronic social care records for all new clients. Having all the information for a client in one record has enabled social workers to react to emergencies involving people under their care more quickly, said the West Midlands council. Electronic social care records were introduced with little disruption to social workers because existing business processes were largely left alone, the council said.

A third of all care homes in Merseyside have closed in the last four years as a result of a growing financial crisis and care home owners in Liverpool have warned they could all fold within a decade if funding issues are not urgently addressed.

Specialist emotional support for children who have witnessed domestic abuse is now being provided in Sedgefield borough. Sedgefield Community Safety Partnership is supporting the new service provided by the Domestic Abuse Outreach Centre, No 31 & SODA (Survivors Of Domestic Abuse) and delivered by Sedgefield Borough Council. National statistics identify that in 90% of incidents of domestic violence a child or children are present or in an adjacent room.

The appointment of a new independent adviser to the Department for Work and Pensions on child poverty was announced today by Minister for Welfare Reform Jim Murphy. Speaking at a visit to Rokeby Boys’ School in East London, he said that Lisa Harker would be working closely with the DWP reviewing the department’s policies and to help progress towards the ambitious target of eradicating child poverty by 2020.

{mosimage} The opportunities for carers to influence the services that affect them can depend entirely on the cultures of their local authorities and primary care trusts. In a new position paper Working together: Carer participation in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, the Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE) has identified that while ‘carer participation’ has been on many agendas for some time, there is a lack of definitions or any shared understanding of what it should actually mean. The paper – based on a UK wide practice survey and a review of available literature –  found that many organisations don’t differentiate between participation and consultation, resulting in carers being consulted about decisions rather than involved in making them.

More carers are needed to work with elderly and disabled people in Cambridgeshire. Plans are being made to boost the number of people working in social care in the region, with the county council sending a team of experts who already work as carers to tell students about their jobs.

Twenty public sector bodies in the West Country aim to start implementing a system to share social care records electronically this summer. More than 10,000 staff across the 20 organisations will have access to the records of anyone with an assessment history living in Devon or Cornwall.

Jails are “reaping the harvest” of the closure of mental hospitals because thousands of psychiatric patients are being incarcerated rather than treated, the chief inspector of prisons says today. In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Anne Owers says that prison overcrowding is caused at least in part by the fact that thousands of mentally ill people are being sent to jail because there is nowhere else to put them. Anne Owers: ‘Prisons often act as mental hospitals’

Two men who sexually abused young boys placed in their foster care have been sent to prison.Ian Wathey, 41, was jailed for five years and his partner, Craig Faunch, 32, for six years after being found guilty of sex offences last month. After sentencing the pair, from Pontefract, West Yorkshire, a judge criticised Wakefield social services. She said it was “quite incredible” police were not involved at an earlier stage and demanded an explanation. Wathey and Faunch were found guilty following a two-week trial at Leeds Crown Court of abusing four boys aged between eight and 14.

One child in 10 aged between one and 15 has a mental health problem, according to doctors, and all children excluded from school should receive a psychiatric assessment. A British Medical Association (BMA) report Child and Adolescent Mental Health says that 1.1 million children between the ages of one and 15 suffer some form of psychiatric problem, including sleep disorders, excessive temper tantrums, depression and obsessive disorders.