NHS staff 'escape crime checks'
BBC News 22nd May 2007

Criminal record checks have not been carried out on tens of thousands of NHS staff, including those working with children and vulnerable adults.

BBC Radio Five Live found 68% of health trusts in the UK do not routinely run checks on staff who began work before the Criminal Records Bureau was set up.

Some 90% of trusts responded to the survey, which came after a listener queried why she was not checked.

Sex on the couch: The therapists who abuse their clients' trust
The Independent 8th May 2007

For a therapist, seducing a client is a wanton abuse of trust. Yet it's far from rare.

When Jo Adams was referred to the counsellor at her GP's surgery, she expected to be given help for her severe depression. But that was not all she received. During the six sessions, her counsellor paid her a number of suggestive compliments. In her desperately ill state, they gave her a boost. "They put me on a false high, even though I'm happily married," says the 35-year-old, who works in sales. "He made me laugh when I was suicidal. I felt I couldn't do without him and if he went out of my life I would go back to the hell of depression I had known."

When the sessions ended, she wrote to him to express her gratitude for helping her. For several months the pair exchanged letters. The counsellor, who was 20 years her senior, poured out his troubled personal life. One day he turned up at her doorstep and they embarked on a four-month relationship. As they kissed and cuddled, he would try to pressurise her into having sex, though she always refused. "It was all very manipulative," she says. "He kept saying it was OK, but I knew it wasn't. I felt powerless. I was very vulnerable. I was so ill, and saw this man as a way out of my depression. I thought I loved him."

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