Finding a care bed for patients who are ready for discharge from hospital will become easier when a new online bed vacancy service, BEDVACS, comes on line. The service is being trialled in the Wirral in the north west and over 200 care homes have enrolled. The NHS Modernisation Agency is funding the service for the first year because of the potential for reducing bed blocking and the contribution it will make to better integration of health and social care.The database contains details of more than 22,000 registered care homes with more than 4 beds. It can be accessed free by the public or care professionals and can match up the care beds to specific requirements. The care homes can update their bed vacancies online so that users of the service can ensure that they are always viewing the most up to date information. Care workers can be given passwords that speed up the process for them.

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The National Council for Voluntary Organisations is concerned that councils are making life unnecessarily difficult for voluntary organizations in the way they are managing funding for the delivery of public services. A report from Compact Advocacy, which helps individual voluntary organisations who feel that Government has breached the Compact between Government and the voluntary sector, sets out the main problem areas.The Government has recognised the legitimacy of the inclusion of overheads in grant applications and contract bids but local authorities and some other funders are not following this line on funding overhead costs. Another irritant is the demand for large volumes of information for relatively small sums of cash. This problem is most acute when local authorities are passing on funding from central government. There is also concern about partnerships which are an increasing source of funding. Issues about accountability and the legal status of partnerships are difficult to resolve. This can lead to uncertainty about whether partnerships are corporate bodies or simply agreements to work together on particular issues.

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By Paul Robson, Nasa Begum and Michael Lock. Some degree of user involvement is essential if public and voluntary services are to respond to user needs. Voluntary organizations have the potential to achieve high levels of involvement including appointment to boards of trustees and filling operational posts. The authors looked at the process of user involvement in the voluntary sector and found it was a difficult path to follow. They offer a analysis of the reasons.