PUPILS TAKE COMPUTERS HOME

Some eighty percent of secondary school pupils in the UK have computers at home, but this leaves one million children without access to the Internet at home because there is no computer in the house. In a move to shrink this digital divide the Department for Education and Skills has launched a ‘Computers for Pupils’ initiative under which eligible schools will receive 10,000 pounds to allow them to fund computers and Internet access.

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ROLE OF DOCTORS EXTENDED TO INFORMATION PRESCRIPTION

Patients, on average, remember about ten percent of what was said during a consultation with their GP and in most cases they follow the care path suggested to them. Because information is the key to helping people make choices about their health care, the Department for Health wants patient to be better informed. The 2006 White Paper ‘Our Health Our Care Our Say’ committed the government to introducing’ Information Prescriptions’ which will give specific information about resources relevant to individual circumstances.

A series of pilots have been launched to trial this new idea. They are being run in partnership with voluntary organisations like Cancerbackup and Macmillan Cancer Support. The initiative will initially focus on cancer and mental health and later on vulnerable older people, and will run until the end of 2007.

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By Mike Brewer, Alissa Goodman and Andrew Leicester. Using household spending to assess poverty reveals different trends to those resulting from examining income. The authors looked at the lowest-income households, and the impact on children and pensioners. They argue that spending is a more reliable guide to longer-term resources than income measured in household surveys.