By Iain Crow, Alan France, Sue Hacking, and Mary Hart Community-based early intervention and prevention programmes aim to tackle future social problems. Their development has become an important part of government’s approach to community capacity building. This evaluation programme shows how one such approach can be implemented in deprived communities, what impacts it is having after five years of implementation and how these can be measured.

There is a warning today that Government plans to use community matrons as a way to keep older people out of hospital may be based on misleading data. The warning, published in the British Medical Journal, is based on a study by the National Primary Care Research and Development Centre at the University of Manchester.The Government plans are designed to cut hospital stays by tracking admission rates in older patients and then using specially trained nurses to care for the elderly people at home. But Research and Development Centre Director Martin Roland, and colleagues, felt the approach could be seriously misleading because admissions would probably decline anyway even without intervention. They tested this theory by tracking emergency admissions of patients who were aged 65 or older and who had had at least two emergency visits to hospital in a single year. That is one of the criteria being used to identify patients for enrolment in the NHS community matron scheme as well as being the main criterion for admission to the Evercare programme, which the research team is also evaluating.

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Primary schools in England are being deprived of urgently needed funding by local education authorities that are not spending the money intended for the schools, according to the National Association of head Teachers.It says returns from LEAs to the Department for Education and Skills, showing the funding position in the current financial year show that over a third of authorities do not spend up their Primary Schools Formula Spending Share. The NAHT says the failure to spend the money may be due to political reasons – such as the Council Tax- or for reasons such as the LEA having other priorities. Whatever the reasons, it says, many primary schools are losing out.

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