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This article aims to describe the aims, role and impact of a specialist intermediate care service for people with dementia in Kent, entitled the Home Treatment Service (HTS). The authors reflect on two workshops about the service, delivered as part of the “Dementia Care: A Positive Future” conference held in May 2010.

The 45 participants in the workshops included service providers, professionals and family carers. The aims and nature of the service were outlined by members of the clinical team as: adopting a multi‐professional approach, emphasising the value of a shared assessment process and having a commitment to flexible and intensive working within a person centred framework.

Focusing on the HTS's work with care homes, presenters offered case illustrations to highlight its collaborative approach to working with service users, staff, managers and families to improve the quality of life for users presenting with “challenging behaviour” and preventing placement breakdown. Discussion with participants explored the obstacles and opportunities in working productively with care homes. The HTS's potential to reduce reliance on anti‐psychotic medication was specifically highlighted. In addition to improving user and carer quality of life, outcomes of HTS intervention include a reduction in and quicker discharge from, mental health hospitals and maintaining the person in their existing setting.

The importance of including all parties – the older person with dementia, relatives, care staff and professionals – in co‐creating “solutions” was identified as one the HTS's keys to success.

A Crown Court hearing of a charge of applying a false A description under S.2, Trade Descriptions Act, 1968, is given in some detail under Legal Proceedings in this issue of BFJ. It concerns using the word “ham”, ie., the natural leg of a single pig, to various pieces from several pigs, deboned, defatted, “tumbled, massaged and cooked” in a mould shaped to a leg of ham, from which the average purchaser would find it impossible to distinguish. As the defence rightly claimed, this process has been used for at least a couple of decades, and the product forms a sizeable section of the bacon trade. Evidence by prosecution witnesses, experienced shop managers, believed the product to be the genuine “ham”. There is nothing detrimental about the meat, save that it tends to contain an excess of added water, but this applies to many meat products today; or that the manufacturers are setting out to cheat the consumer. What offends is the description given to the product. Manufacture was described in detail—a county trading standards officer inspected the process at the defendant company's Wiltshire factory, witness to the extent of their co‐operation—and was questioned at great length by defending counsel. Specimens of the product were exhibited and the jury were treated to a tasting test—presumably designed to refute prosecution's claim that the meat was of “poor value”. The trial judge said the jury had no doubt been enlightened as to the methods of manufacturing ham. The marketing of the product was also a subject of examination.

LIBRARY activity has been very great since the year opened. On all sides librarians report issues which are greatly in excess of any previously reached. This has been interpreted by ourselves and by others as a reflex of the general unemployment. It is also due no doubt to the lack of pence on the part of many people for amusements, who find that reading is a cheap form of diversion. There can be no cause for anything but satisfaction in the fact that in such unhappy times our people turn to books. It is a hopeful sign, for the nation that reads gathers a resilience and buoyancy which can be got from few other activities.

HIS holidays over, before the individual and strenuous winter work of his library begins, the wise librarian concentrates for a few weeks on the Annual Meeting of the Library Association. This year the event is of unusual character and of great interest. Fifty years of public service on the part of devoted workers are to be commemorated, and there could be no more fitting place for the commemoration than Edinburgh. It is a special meeting, too, in that for the first time for many years the Library Association gathering will take a really international complexion. If some too exacting critics are forward to say that we have invited a very large number of foreign guests to come to hear themselves talk, we may reply that we want to hear them. There is a higher significance in the occasion than may appear on the surface—for an effort is to be made in the direction of international co‐operation. In spite of the excellent work of the various international schools, we are still insular. Now that the seas are open and a trip to America costs little more than one to (say) Italy, we hope that the way grows clearer to an almost universal co‐working amongst libraries. It is overdue. May our overseas guests find a real atmosphere of welcome, hospitality and friendship amongst us this memorable September!

Legal process by its very nature cannot be swift; step by step, it must be steady and sure and this takes time. There is no room for hasty decisions for these would tend to defeat its purpose. Time, however, is of the essence and this is set for various aspects of legal action by limitation of actions legislation, which sets periods after which the case is no longer actionable. The periods are adequate and in civil law, generous to avoid injustice being done. The one serious complaint against the process of law, however, is the unwarrantable delays which are possible despite limitation. From the far‐off days of Equity, when Dickens' Jarndyce v Jarndyce, caricatured and exaggerated as it was, described the scene down to the present when delays, often spoken of in Court as outrageous are encountered, to say nothing of the crowded lists in the High Courts and Crown Courts; the result of the state of society and not the fault of the judiciary. Early in 1980, it was reported that 14,500 cases were awaiting trial in the Southeastern Circuit Crown Court alone. Outside the Courts legal work hangs on, to the annoyance of those concerned; from house purchase to probate. Here, the solicitor is very much his own master, unhampered by statutory time limits and the only recourse a client has is to change this solicitor, with no certainty that there will be any improvement, or appeal to the Law Society.

THE Programme of the Library Association Conference which reached us on April 22nd is one of much interest. Every year increases the difficulty of providing matter which has such appeal that members can say at the close that the time has been spent profitably. The pre‐print of the papers—a rather incomplete affair—raises the thought that Conference time could be better used than in discussions on such “Research Committee” matters as library vans and temporary buildings, excellent as we admit the enquiries and results of them to be. Yet this reflection is accompanied by the certainty that there have been few conferences which have not contributed something of material use to every participator and we still hold the view that more is learned in “a week at one than in months of hermit‐like seclusion.” That last quotation was written in the first edition of Brown's Manual and is valid to this day. Our representatives will write impressions after the event, not by way of detailed report, but as endeavouring to sum up what, if anything, material has been achieved. The report published by the Association usually gives the papers in extenso, but we wish its issue could be delayed long enough to provide more informative records of the discussions. As the best contributions occasionally come from the floor, the bare‐bones notes of the names of speakers and almost telegram‐like utterances they are supposed to have made, which have been the customary report, could be greatly improved.

Few areas of public service exist in which those who work to provide them receive the recognition their efforts justly deserve, and regretably no where more so than in the local health and consumer protection services. These services have a long history of public indifference, which in years past bordered on contempt. They were labelled “public servants” in a manner that implied they were the personal servants of ratepayers, apointed by them and paid from monies they provided.

EVEN TO THOSE who profess to have made a study of Scottish literature, Sharpe's name is comparatively unknown. He is often thought of as an obscure antiquarian friend of Scott's, the original of Malachi Malagrowther, an eccentric in a city always famed for its eccentrics. Yet one cannot go very far in the study of ballads and of Scottish popular poetry without coming across his name: it was he who contributed one of the finest and most tersely expressed of all the ballads to Scott's Minstrelsy—‘The Twa Corbies’—as well as giving Scott his version of ‘The Douglas Tragedy’ and ‘Bessie Bell and Mary Gray’. A great deal of the material in Chambers's Popular Rhymes of Scotland—that pioneering work which, like most of Robert Chambers's, has not received the attention it deserves—was provided by Sharpe. In the field of demonology and the study of witchcraft, too, he was an authority: his edition of Law's Memorialls was enriched by copious and erudite footnotes and in his introduction, amounting to 254 quarto pages, he wrote a lively and informative historical survey of witchcraft in Scotland from the earliest times until the end of the eighteenth century.