These days we all tend to treat the phrase 'care in the community' with considerable cynicism.

It seems to be a byword for closing hospital wards and ushering vulnerable people out into the wide world without the support on which they have come to rely.

So when it is used for patients at Southmead Hospital with severe mental health problems there should be real cause for concern.

Here are people who, through no fault of their own, need constant supervision and regular prescribed drugs. For them, the world must seem a confusing and sometimes alarming place.

Moving them out into different surroundings with unknown faces and imposing a completely different routine on them will be stressful and potentially damaging.

And, of course, there is the risk that some of them may pose a danger to other people.

These patients may only be out of hospital for six months but a lot can happen in that time.

After all, if they were able to cope with life in the community, they would not be in hospital in the first place.

Dispiriting news

AN excess of bad news can sometimes give a warped view of what society is really like.

And newspapers like the Post try to offer a balance by emphasising the positive when it happens.

But today we report on two cases where people lack so much in human decency that their actions deserve to be brought before the community.

First we have grandad Wayne Morgan, who stole money from charity tins at St Bernadette's Old Boys' rugby club in Whitchurch.

Club members had been suspicious that bar takings were disappearing and when they installed CCTV cameras, they discovered Morgan was not only pocketing the profits, but he had also emptied the charity tins.

This has echoes of the Colin Rossiter case earlier this week. He was jailed for stealing money from a Poppy Appeal collection tin.

In the other incident today, Jessica King's car was stolen by a man who had conned her into thinking her wheel was about to fall off.

In both cases, the villains took advantage of people who had trusted them. It is this failing in human nature which is so dispiriting for law-abiding people because most of us instinctively want to trust others, but cases like these would make us think again.