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&cat=19&pid=15822&cache=true " alt="‘Too many’ freed inmates on drugs" class="alignleft" />
More than a quarter of inmates being released from Perth Prison test positive for illegal substances, a report has revealed. Chief Inspector of Prisons Brigadier Hugh Munro said at 28%, the figure was “far too high” and suggested drugs were being smuggled into the jail. Despite the criticism, he said the jail was “well led” and praised relations between staff and inmates. Brig Munro also said a major building programme at the jail was well-managed. His inspection found that improvements to prison food at the point of serving were needed, along with the laundry service and support for non-English speaking inmates. He expressed concern that prisoners leaving the jail early to go to court did not always receive a proper breakfast or have the opportunity to shower. In some cases, he said such inmates were not being given prescribed medication and that conditions at Perth and Dundee Sheriff Courts were poor. ‘Dirty’ and ‘unkempt’ He said: “The overall inspection of Perth concludes that it is a very well led and managed prison.” He added: “This is a positive report and I have been impressed by so many areas of good practice, particularly given all of the disruption caused by the building works.” But citing the 28% of inmates who leave the jail under the influence of illegal substances, Brig Munro said: “This figure suggests, amongst other things, that illegal drugs are being smuggled into Perth prison and this is a cause for concern.” He also criticised conditions for young offenders being housed at the recently mothballed Friarton Hall, an annexe located about a mile from the prison’s main building. He said: “It seemed to me that the positive effects of strong leadership, so evident in the main prison, were less obvious at Friarton with the result that we found a less well-managed unit.” He said the problems could have been caused by a lack of certainty surrounding the future of the hall but added: “Friarton was dirty, unkempt and run down. “It needed to be completely refurbished. “On the other hand I was impressed by the standard of the external work placements available to some of the young offenders.” This article is from the BBC News website . © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
April 14, 2010 | Posted in
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&cat=19&pid=15572&cache=true " alt="Indonesia plane breaks on landing" class="alignleft" />
A passenger aircraft carrying more than 100 people has crashed on landing in the Indonesian province of Papua. At least 20 people were injured when the Boeing 737 Merpati Nusantara Airline plane veered off the end of the runway into a river and broke in half. Officials said heavy rain may have caused the crash but that the pilots had followed safety regulations. Indonesia relies heavily on air travel but has one of the worst aviation safety records in Asia. Passenger Zainal Hayat, 52, said the plan had flown safely but “just didn’t stop” when it touched down. “It skidded very fast and I felt it hit something twice before it stopped and tumbled down,” he said. “All the passengers were in a total panic, some even screamed and cried.” Indonesia’s director general of civil aviation said the plane had come to a halt with its tail section in a small river, about 200m (220 yards) from the runway. Herry Bhakti Singayuda told the AFP news agency all 103 passengers and six crew had escaped and the injured had been taken to hospital, some with broken limbs. Sukandi, a spokesman for the airline, told AFP it had been raining when the plane landed in Manokwari but that the pilots had “followed all the safety procedures regarding landing in wet conditions”. Transport officials were reported to be on their way to the scene to investigate. Indonesians rely on air transport to travel around the country’s 18,000 islands. In July 2007, the European Union banned all Indonesia-based jets from its airspace, after a series of air crashes in Indonesia. Four airlines were taken off the blacklist last year following safety improvements, but Merpati remains among those banned. This article is from the BBC News website . © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
April 13, 2010 | Posted in
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&cat=19&pid=10570&cache=true " alt="Standard of care services graded" class="alignleft" />
One in six care homes for the elderly is providing unsatisfactory or weak services, a report on standards in Scotland has warned. But the study rated 80% of all care services across the country as good, very good or excellent. The Care Commission studied the quality of care provided by adult and children’s services in Scotland over the year to March 2009. It also judged nursing agencies, foster care and childminders. The Care Commission said they were focusing on services which were performing badly to demand improvements to ensure the required quality of care. This is the first year of graded results for care services, which were gathered from more than 11,000 inspections carried out by the Care Commission. Private sector The ‘Making the Grade’ report, found that one in six care homes for the elderly achieved poor grades, with the services they provide judged as unsatisfactory or weak in at least one area. Just over 3% of care homes achieved these grades in every category they were judged on, including quality of care, staffing and management. Housing support and care-at-home services achieved the best results in adult services, with 48% and 46% respectively achieving grades of very good or excellent. For adult services, the private sector had the highest proportion of services receiving poor grades while the voluntary sector had the highest proportion of services with high grades. In Fife, 40% of adult services, the highest in the country, were judged as very good or excellent, whereas 4.5% of services in Argyll & Bute, the highest proportion, were found to be unsatisfactory or weak. ” It is so important that people who use services and families understand that they can play a major role in insisting on and driving forward improvements in care standards ” Ronnie Hill Care Commission The majority of children’s services achieved good grades, with about 98% judged adequate for their quality of care and support. One in three childminding services scored highly across every category while 25% of children’s day-care services also achieved the top grades. Care Commission director Ronnie Hill said: “The grading system provides people in care and their families with better information and therefore more choice and involvement about the standards of care provided at every care service in Scotland.” He added: “It is so important that people who use services and families understand that they can play a major role in insisting on and driving forward improvements in care standards. “Grading gives everyone ‘at-a-glance’ information about whether a service is performing well or not. “It means that good providers are getting the recognition they deserve and those who need to do better are under intense pressure to improve. “To get good grades, services have to show that the children and adults who use the services have good outcomes, are well cared for, supported and protected.” Examples of good practice singled out in the report included the Highland Hospice, Harmeny School in Edinburgh and Hilton Lodge Nursing Home in East Lothian. The Care Commission has the power to take enforcement action and shut down poorly-performing services. A new regulator, the Social Work Inspection Agency (SWIA), will take on the work currently undertaken by the Care Commission next year.
March 26, 2010 | Posted in
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&cat=19&pid=9804&cache=true " alt="Experts stay at social services" class="alignleft" />
Outside experts will continue to oversee the work of Swansea Council’s social services department a year after they were first appointed. They were first called in due to fears the local authority was failing to protect vulnerable young people. Deputy social services minister Gwenda Thomas told assembly members progress was being made and “significant new resources” were being spent. But she said an inspection in January found services were “inconsistent.” The assembly government’s unprecedented intervention last year followed two critical reports which severely criticised the way the council protected vulnerable children. As a result an independent board was appointed to monitor the department’s daily work and to report back to ministers. In an update to the Senedd, following a fresh inspection by the Care and Social Services Inspectorate Wales (CSSIW), Ms Thomas said: “I am pleased to hear of the progress that is being made. ” The important thing now is to build on this foundation ” Councillor Nick Tregoning, cabinet member for Swansea social services “CSSIW found clear experiences of good practice being delivered by front line staff.” But she said was clear there had been significant increases in workloads over recent months with higher numbers of looked after children and children on the child protection register. She said: “CSSIW makes clear that whilst ‘sound and effective momentum for change’ is now in place ‘there remain further challenges to deliver and sustain service improvement’. “The review team judged, again to quote the report, ‘that the local authority remains at present, uncertainly placed to deliver and sustain service improvement’. “I therefore strongly believe that it is in the interests of children in Swansea that the order I made remains in force and that the intervention board continues.” The council’s cabinet member for social services, Nick Tregoning said he was aware there was “still plenty more work to do.” He added: “I am pleased that the inspectors have recognised the hard work and efforts put in by staff across the service to continue the improvements, despite a significant increase in referrals and workload. “These improvements are across the board and in key areas such as leadership, cross-party working, performance management, the range of services we provide and the work of our front-line staff. “The important thing now is to build on this foundation to ensure these improvements are embedded in the service.” Conservative health spokesman Andrew RT Davies AM said: “Reports last week about events in Swansea graphically illustrate what happens when things go wrong in children’s services. Such tragedies must not be repeated. “I commend the work that has been carried out to date but recognise that these green shoots must now grow into a sustainable service that operates robustly and effectively.”
March 23, 2010 | Posted in
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&cat=19&pid=8682&cache=true " alt="Hadron smashes energy record again" class="alignleft" />
The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest physics experiment, has broken its own record for particle collisions. On Friday morning, the machine created two beams of protons, each with an energy of 3.5 trillion electron volts. The effort breaks the prior record, set by the LHC in December, of just over a trillion electron volts in each beam. The LHC will now aim to smash those two beams together, hoping to create new particles that give insight into the most fundamental workings of physics. The experiment, housed in a 27km-long tunnel under the outskirts of Geneva in Switzerland, has only been back online since November 2009. A breakdown and helium leak in 2008, shortly after the machine was first switched on, took some 14 months to repair. “Getting the beams to 3.5 TeV is testimony to the soundness of the LHC’s overall design, and the improvements we’ve made since the breakdown in September 2008,” said Steve Myers, director for accelerators and technology at the Swiss laboratory Cern, where the LHC is based. “It’s a great credit to the patience and dedication of the LHC operation team.” Since coming back online, the machine has exhibited performance that was “remarkable”, according to Cern director general Rolf Heuer. In an announcement of the 3.5 TeV result, he congratulated the LHC team and stressed the cutting-edge nature of its work. “We must not lose sight of the fact that the LHC is new, and it wasn’t bought off the shelf,” he wrote. As with all particle accelerators, the LHC will be periodically shut down for maintenance, but LHC officials recently decided to significantly lengthen the shutdown period. This is in part because the machine takes so long to cool down to and warm up from the low temperatures required for its experiments. But the shutdown scheduled for late 2010 will also address the joints between the machine’s superconducting magnets, which must be strengthened before the LHC can run at even higher energies. “It is a state of the art prototype that is pushing the limits of technology across a wide range of disciplines, and as such it needs to be treated with the greatest respect,” Professor Heuer wrote. “It takes time, but as we’ve seen this week, patience pays dividends.”
March 19, 2010 | Posted in
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&cat=19&pid=7451&cache=true " alt="Police stops ‘target minorities’" class="alignleft" />
Most police forces in England and Wales still unfairly target black and Asian people in their use of stop and search powers, the equality watchdog has said. The Equality and Human Rights Commission said it could not rule out legal action against some forces. Its research found black people were at least six times more likely and Asian people around twice as likely to be stopped and searched as white people. The Home Office acknowledged that there were “improvements still needed”. Nonetheless, the commission has written to forces warning that they could potentially be sued for breaching the Race Relations Act. The report came as EHRC chairman Trevor Phillips was criticised by a parliamentary committee over his leadership. ‘Over-represented’ According to the EHRC’s review, the evidence suggested that racial stereotyping and discrimination were significant factors behind the higher rates of stops and searches. The areas with the most disproportionate use of the powers against black people included Dorset, Hampshire and Leicestershire, said the EHRC. More than 11% of black people across the UK were stopped and searched in 2007-8, with the figure almost 20% in London, the report suggested. That compares with 2.2% of people stopped and searched in the population as a whole. ” Literally hundreds of thousands of black people are subject to this humiliating experience ” Simon Woolley EHRC It estimated that black people in London borough of Wandsworth were more than nine times more likely than white people to be stopped and searched. The likelihood was more than six times higher in four other boroughs: Lambeth (7.3); Tower Hamlets (7.2); Hammersmith and Fulham (6.9) and Kensington and Chelsea (6.9). Researchers also found that black and ethnic minority youths were over-represented in the criminal justice system. According to the EHRC report, research found police were more likely to give white youths more lenient reprimands or fines, while black youths were more likely to be charged. The Stop and Think report drew on data from the Ministry of Justice, the Home Office, the Metropolitan Police and the Office for National Statistics. It found that across England and Wales there were 22 stops and searches per 1,000 people in 2007-08 – totalling more than 170,000 in all. But it calculated that there would have been only about 25,000 searches if black people were stopped and searched at the same rate as white people. ‘Sledgehammer’ EHRC commissioner Simon Woolley said stop and search was not even an effective way of tackling crime. He added: “We do know that it is a sledgehammer-to-crack-a-nut approach. “Literally hundreds of thousands of black people are subject to this humiliating experience. Actually, what the evidence does tell us is that when police forces use different tactics, they cut stop and search, crime goes down.” A Home Office spokeswoman said: “The government is committed to delivering a policing service, and a wider criminal justice system, which promotes equality and does not discriminate against anyone because of their race. There will be no let-up in driving forward the improvements still needed. “The National Policing Improvement Agency’s ‘Next Steps’ programme will enable individual police forces to address these issues in stop and search more effectively.”
March 15, 2010 | Posted in
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&cat=19&pid=7342&cache=true " alt="Road travel ‘needs big overhaul’" class="alignleft" />
There needs to be a “radical overhaul” of road travel in the UK to avoid future gridlock, the CBI business organisation has warned. It said measures that need to be explored include staggered work commutes, increased car sharing, and more working from home. The CBI estimates road congestion now costs the UK economy up to
March 15, 2010 | Posted in
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&cat=19&pid=6018&cache=true " alt="More schools likely to be failed" class="alignleft" />
More schools are being judged inadequate under a new inspection regime, figures from England’s schools watchdog are expected to show. Ofsted introduced a new framework in September 2009 which requires schools to achieve higher results to be rated as good or outstanding. The watchdog has insisted its new-style inspections would “raise the bar” on its expectations of schools. Data on schools’ performance under the system will be released on Wednesday. Last week the Times Educational Supplement said the new regime had seen a near doubling in the proportion of schools judged “inadequate”, while the proportion rated “outstanding” was less than half of what it used to be. But inspectors said they now had “higher expectations on behalf of pupils and parents”. ” It is no surprise if there is a rise in inadequate schools – it just reflects the fact that the bar has been raised ” Department for Children, Schools and Families A spokesman for Ofsted said: “We have made it clear that every time an inspection framework is revised, expectations are raised too.” Ofsted said the reaction from schools had been “overwhelmingly positive”, with nine out of 10 who had responded to feedback surveys saying they were satisfied with the way inspection was carried out. A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said: “We made clear in the schools White Paper last June that inspection from September would be more challenging. “It is no surprise if there is a rise in inadequate schools – it just reflects the fact that the bar has been raised and weaker schools are being inspected earlier in the cycle.” New regime Under the new arrangements, outstanding and good schools are only inspected once within a five-year period – previously it was every three years. Satisfactory schools are inspected every three years and inadequate schools are visited regularly until they make the improvements necessary. The new regime sees inspectors assess twice as many lessons and more emphasis is put on questionnaires filled out by parents and pupils. Inspectors put more emphasis on pupil attainment – a point which has caused controversy, particularly for schools in challenging areas – rather than on improvement. Schools are given two days’ warning of an inspection and the inspections lasts for two days. Ofsted said the new format was introduced in response to teachers’ concerns inspections focused too much on schools data and inspectors did not assess enough lessons. The watchdog said more than 2,000 inspections had been carried out under the new system between September and December last year. Chris Richardson, head teacher at the Kings of Wessex School in Somerset, said the new inspection framework brought “significant improvements”, particularly a sharper focus on student achievement. “A new self-evaluation form meant we felt well prepared for inspection and it gave the inspectors a good overview of the school. “Our students valued the opportunities to engage with the inspectors and give their perspective on the school.” But John Fairhurst, head of Shenfield High School in Essex, said the new inspection framework had downgraded his school from good with outstanding features to satisfactory, simply because the school’s GCSE results in 2008 were weak. “It’s become a rather skimpy inspection with an altered agenda – heavily data driven,” he said. “The framework proved, in our case, superficial and underestimated the good work of the school.” The Association for School and College Leaders and the National Association of Head Teachers are also critical of the regime, saying it puts too much emphasis on raw attainment.
March 10, 2010 | Posted in
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&cat=19&pid=5917&cache=true " alt="Facebook killer monitoring probed" class="alignleft" />
Police monitoring of a sex offender who killed a teenager he met on Facebook is to be investigated by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC). Peter Chapman was on the sex offenders’ register, but he went missing from his Merseyside home and police did not know where he was when Ashleigh Hall died. The move follows a call by the Home Secretary for lessons to be learned. Chapman, 33, was jailed for life after raping and murdering Ashleigh, 17, in a field in County Durham, last October. The Merseyside force had been keeping tabs on the serial sex offender, but he vanished from his home in Kirkby in January last year. Attempts were made to locate him locally, but it was not until September, one month before Ashleigh was murdered, that police issued a nationwide wanted alert. A Merseyside Police spokesman said: “An internal review was carried out following the arrest of Peter Chapman in October last year. “Following the review, a number of procedural improvements were identified and subsequently implemented. “However, in view of the public interest and concerns raised following the conviction of Peter Chapman and to ensure complete transparency in terms of this particular matter, the force has referred it to the Independent Police Complaints Commission.”
March 9, 2010 | Posted in
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An expert team is being brought in to improve a failing maternity unit run by an NHS hospital foundation trust in Buckinghamshire where two babies died. Milton Keynes General Hospital was too slow implementing recommendations made in 2008, said the independent regulator of NHS foundation trusts, Monitor. In January a Care Quality Commission (CQC) report said more work was needed. The hospital trust had said it would recruit more midwives but now Monitor says experts must oversee the process. Must accelerate improvements Inquests held into the deaths of babies Romy Feast in 2007 and Ebony McCall in 2009 criticised the hospital. Earlier the CQC had said Milton Keynes Hospital must accelerate improvements to ensure it provided “safe and effective care for mothers and babies”. It said temporary measures were “not sustainable” and added the hospital trust should concentrate on recruiting more permanent midwives and open more permanent beds. It had also said the trust must improve planning for emergency situations. ” I would like to reassure local women they can feel entirely safe coming to Milton Keynes Hospital to have their babies. ” Dr Walter Greaves, Milton Keynes NHS Foundation Trust Now the independent regulator, Monitor says the Board of Milton Keynes NHS Foundation Trust has failed to implement quickly enough the action plan following the 12 recommendations in the Healthcare Commission’s December 2008 report. The recruitment of a consultant midwife and a sufficient number of additional midwives has yet to carried out, Monitor said. The regulator has insisted that the trust “appoint external expert clinical advisers, to be agreed with Monitor, to assist the Trust to speed up the delivery of necessary improvements”. ‘Safe service’ Milton Keynes NHS Foundation Trust has responded to Monitor saying the plan is already well underway and more midwives are joining the Trust over the next two months. The trust’s chairman, Dr Walter Greaves said: “We are pleased that Monitor has examined our plan with such care and we look forward to working with these experts. “Our maternity department provides a safe and quality service for local mothers, many of whom compliment us on the care they and their babies receive. “I would like to reassure local women they can feel entirely safe coming to Milton Keynes Hospital to have their babies.”
March 4, 2010 | Posted in
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