There are plenty of brave words spoken and written about the care of older people. Trouble is, not too much of it seems to be turned into deeds.

Take the latest pronouncements from Frank Dobson, the Health Secretary, when he launched the new White Paper, Modernising Social Services.

Mr Dobson said that he wanted social services to encourage people to live in their own homes, helping them to do things for themselves.

But isn't that what Care in the Community was supposed to be all about when the concept was launched a decade ago?

It's always been a tremendous theory. Instead of looking after infirm older people in residential and nursing homes, provide the support to help them stay in their own homes with their independence and in familiar surroundings. Brilliant.

Trouble is, of course, that it was soon demonstrated that providing the right sort of support costs a lot of money, and there has never been enough cash forthcoming. So people have missed out. Care in the community has become, in too many cases, neglect in the community. Or the responsibility has ended up with families, who have found themselves in the role of carers as they struggle to fill the gaps in care left by the over-stretched welfare services.

This new initiative might be different, of course. As I understand it, Frank Dobson has proposed that older people who need care should be given payments to enable them to buy it in the form of home care, day care, or occasional short stays in residential or nursing homes.

Great idea. But there must be a snag. And there is. It seems that the payments will come from the local authorities, the very people who currently don't have enough money to do a proper job of caring in the community.

Unless the Government gives them more (and that seems highly unlikely, given the way Bradford has been treated this last week), these payments will have to come out of the same pot of money.

If Frank Dobson wants local authority social services to do more to help people to live in their own homes, he is going to have to put some Government new money where his mouth is. Otherwise the so-called initiative will turn out to be yet another example of words without the wherewithal to turn them into deeds.

And now, I have a request to pass on from an 89-year-old reader who would prefer to remain anonymous. Let's call her Enid. She would like us all to give a bit more consideration to people who are hard of hearing.

Enid says that when she goes to a day centre, she misses out on a lot of the conversation because people don't look at her when they're talking to her so she can't read their lips. Or they talk to each other, leaving her out in the cold. Or they start saying something to her then turn away to face somebody else to finish the sentence, so that it tails off.

It must be rather isolating to find yourself physically part of a group of people, yet separated from the rest by your deafness. In fact, I suppose it could be enough to discourage some people from going out to seek company.

So maybe we should all try a bit harder to make life easier for those people who are forever ending up only getting part of the story because we don't give enough thought to the problems of deafness.

One of the mot unwelcome inventions of our time could turn out to be a gadget currently being worked on by scientists in California. If they perfect it, it could be able to tell people from an early age not only what they will die of, but more or less when.

How appalling to spend your life under the shadow of increasing dread as every year passes and your certain fate draws nearer!

Forget your gadget, boffins. Most of us would rather keep on living with uncertainty, because along with it goes the hope that springs eternal.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.