The Conservative Party’s plans for an extra £8 billion annual health spending aren’t enough to halt a decline in quality care – never mind transform the NHS.
National Adoption Week is upon us and we are again being asked to consider becoming adoptive parents to a child in care. In the past four years the week to recruit adopters has quadrupled, leading to a…
Accusations are being made that the UK government is failing to meet the very standards it set for itself when it comes to veterans. Medical experts say former military personnel are not being given the…
Health secretary Jeremy Hunt has said he wants to develop “integrated care organisations” in the English NHS, with NHS hospital trusts taking a lead role in forming them. This has been challenged, quite…
Reports of child abuse related to accusations of witchcraft are on the rise in London, with 27 allegations made to the Metropolitan Police in the past year and 148 cases since 2004. Yet the people charged…
Two recent complementary reports on long-term care for older people – one from the Demos Commission on Residential Care, chaired by former care minister Paul Burstow, and the other from the King’s Fund…
In order to protect children from harm, the state has the power to separate children from their parents. In exceptional cases it is sometimes necessary to separate siblings – to protect them from harm…
Rotherham Metropolitan Council has released its independent report on the handling of child sexual exploitation cases in the borough between 1997 and 2013. The author of the report, Professor Alexis Jay…
When we think of nurses, we generally think of someone with high social motivation and a strong desire to help people. The nurturing, altruistically motivated individual – probably female – plays strongly…
Given conventional ideas of male roles, we often tend to imagine carers as being women. But more men take on this “unpaid work” than you might think, and particularly in older groups. Research we’ve carried…
Child protection social workers appear in the media for all the wrong reasons. Most of the time, after a child abuse inquiry, they’re blamed for not doing enough or for acting too hastily and removing…
Despite significant progress over time, we still know very little about what works to improve people’s health in some areas of healthcare – but we suspect that some things need to be very tailored to the…
Most people would agree with Jeremy Hunt that isolation and loneliness are bad things and that we should try to make sure that older people (and everyone else) do not suffer from them. So far so good…
That the Care Quality Commission, the watchdog in charge of health and social care in England, is considering hidden cameras and mystery-shopper exercises in care homes and domiciliary care sounds plausible…
It should come as no surprise to anyone that there is a growing crisis in adult social care. Policymakers, practitioners and people using services alike all argue that the current system is fundamentally…
1,200 killed by mental patients – shock ten-year toll exposes care crisis The Sun used this apparently shocking statistic this week to blame the criminal justice system for the death of Christina Edkins…