Elderly left at risk by NHS bidding war

Elderly left at risk by NHS bidding wars to find cheapest care with reverse auctions

An online auction system developed for councils to buy cheap wheelie bins and stationery is being used to buy end-of-life and dementia care for vulnerable elderly people.

The NHS in London has held a series of 30 “reverse e-auctions”, where bids are driven down instead of up, for £195 million worth of contracts for palliative and dementia care for patients leaving hospital.

Read more on this story in The Times

‘They stole my little girl’, says mother judged too stupid to care for her baby

A young mother who was judged too stupid to care for her own baby has accused social workers of ‘stealing’ the child from her.
The woman, who must be identified only as Rachel for legal reasons, is taking her case to the European Court of Human Rights in a last ditch attempt to halt the adoption of the child, now aged three.
Read more on this story in The Daily Mail

Charity loses funding to help child refugees wrongly classified as adults

Hundreds of children fleeing war and persecution will be wrongly denied education and given no more help than adult asylum seekers in the UK under controversial changes introduced by the government, a leading charity warned yesterday.

The Refugee Council said the removal of its Home Office funding to work with “age-disputed” asylum seekers would leave vulnerable children incorrectly assessed by officials as over 18, many of them severely traumatised by their experiences and at risk of harm, with no one to help them prove their real age.

Read more on this story in The Guardian