Society daily 26.01.10

Dealing with drunkenness: just one of the daily hurdles faced by the ambulance service. Photograph: Lefteris Pitarakis/AP

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Mike Stein: Why the Edlington case should not be published in full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

offered shares in new companies being created by the government to manage public sector "back office" and property services

• 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

brilliant ambulance service blogger Tom Reynolds

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 Faisel Rahman Denis Campbell John Hills

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

• The public could be , in a re-run of the 1986 "tell Sid" campaign devised to sell British Gas shares to the public, reports the FT. Here's a succinct reminder, from the , 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): 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 on loan sharks, on obesity, on equality and Esther Cameron on why bosses should never be too nice.