Society daily 26.01.10

Today's top Society stories Britain in 2010: more tolerant, more conservative, says social attitudes survey Mercy killing mother cleared of murder after helping seriously ill daughter to die Care home manager "murdered for drugs" Police forces to merge, say MPs Mike Stein: Why the Edlington case should not be published in full Dr Crippen: will the new dementia tsar do any good? Other news • The public could be offered shares in new companies being created by the government to manage public sector "back office" and property services , in a re-run of the 1986 "tell Sid" campaign devised to sell British Gas shares to the public, reports the FT. • Doctors are to have their skills checked every five years to ensure that they are still competent – and if they fail, they will face retraining or lose their licence to practise, says the Daily Telegraph. • The Tories have vowed to publish the serious case reviews into the Edlington and Baby Peter cases if they are elected, the Sun reports. The public services frontline: in at the deep end Here's a succinct reminder, from the brilliant ambulance service blogger Tom Reynolds , about how extraordinarily intense working life can be for public servants at the coalface. Tom's had a student with him for the last two weeks, and during that short period she received this hectic introduction to 999 life (what follows is an edited version of the list): She saw her first dead body. She spoke to her first patient, calmed her first scared patient. She met her first alcoholic (who was nice) and her second alcoholic (who wasn't). She got cut out of her first car, holding the neck of the driver who'd crashed it. She carried her first patient down a couple of flights of stairs. She dealt with her first case of domestic violence, and her first heart attack. From Tom's blog entries ( and his books ) you know that this was not an unusually busy fortnight. When the student graduates to the frontline full-time, the pace won't slow. She faces daily confrontations with death, disease, violence, fear, heartbreak, madness, delusion, cruelty and stupidity – not to mention feelings of frustration, anger and self-doubt, as well as occasional euphoria, and moments of intense satisfaction and pride. I've been a fan of Tom's blog Random Acts of Reality for years now – he's written the odd piece for the Guardian , and a couple of years ago we persuaded him to speak to top public sector executives at the Guardian's Public Summit conference . I've realised his skill is not just his oustanding ability to tell stories – to take readers into the world of the ambulance service – but to explain to us, with great modesty, simplicity and humanity, why public servants like him do what they do. It's very easy to get disillusioned with the job, I know I have, but when you are teaching someone, the tricks and tips that they don't teach in school – the ways to look at patients, the ways to talk to them to ease their fears, the ways to not get burnt out too quickly – well, then you get a chance to take a step back and realise what it is you enjoy about the job. In Wednesday's Society Guardian supplement Amelia Gentleman on a relationships course for new parents that has caught the Conservatives' eye. Ahead of the Social Enterprise Coalition's annual conference next week, we interview its new chief executive, Peter Holbrook. Plus Faisel Rahman on loan sharks, Denis Campbell on obesity, John Hills on equality and Esther Cameron on why bosses should never be too nice. Society links Sign up to the SocietyGuardian email briefing Society on Twitter SocietyGuardian.co.uk Get ahead: the Guardian's public and voluntary sector careers page Hundreds of public and voluntary sector jobs