Life in and around Headington & OX3 (mostly), and Oxford (occasionally)
"To every complex problem there is a simple solution, startling in its simplicity, piercing in its clarity, and hopelessly and completely wrong" - Gore Vidal.
After initially being delayed by a month the Access to Headington work in Headley Way and Cherwell Drive has been put back to start in the new year. As the County explains this is because of major sewer works to be carried out in St Clements.
The County will consider whether some other part of Access to Headington can be brought forward instead.
Your weekly round-up of local news for 3 – 9 July.
Thames Water starts sewer replacement works in St Clements today, lasting for several weeks. There will be long delays. You have been warned.
Councillors and The Oxford Mail are reporting that because of the work in St Clements, the Headley Way stage of Access to Headington, recently rescheduled to start on 24 July, has now been put back to the new year. This has yet to be confirmed on the County’s website, but it seems highly probable. This potentially pushes the work into conflict with building work on the JR site. Update, 1500 10/07/17 The County has now confirmed the postponement.
Police are appealing for witnesses and information about a suspected arson in Weyland Road last Sunday (2 July).
As predicted by the Huffington Post and reported in HH323, Oxford East MP Anneliese ‘One of Nine to Shine’ Dodds has been made a front-bench Treasury spokeswoman for Labour.
With the closure of the Marston Medical Centre patients have been re-allocated to other practices. Some will go to a unit based at the Marston Pharmacy, others have been allocated to a new unit being set up in the grounds of the JR at Arthur Sanctuary House (ASH, the building opposite the Women’s Centre). Patients have been told there will be no extra parking at ASH so anyone arriving by car will need to join the queues of drivers trying to get into the JR pay-for-parking car parks. Coming from Marston, the JR is served by the 13, X13, 14, and 700 bus services, which would be a sensible alternative for those who can use them.
The planning application by @TheSpiritofToad for a café at their new South Park distillery was called in by councillors after a close vote at the West Area Planning Committee. It will be decided at the Planning review Committee meeting this Wednesday (12 July).
@HeadingtonNews has sifted through all the site allocations in the City Council’s Preferred Options local plan document and produced a list of all the sites in the Headington area. Do try and find time to look at the consultation and make your views known.
Street names for the @BartonPark_ development have been released. The main spine road is to be Barton Fields Road (why not Barton Park Road?). Other names commemorate well-known Barton people, including Barry Holden, former Vice President of the Barton Community Association, and Elizabeth Maud Smith, a resident of Barton for 57 years.
Oxford Health NHS Trust @OxfordHealthNHS, who run the Warneford Hospital, showed their masterplan for how they want to develop the site into a world-leading treatment and research centre. Oxford University is collaborating to help them raise funds, but nothing’s likely to happen for a while yet. Exhibitions of the masterplan will be arranged over the summer months.
Travellers are back on the Marston Ferry Road cycle path. They were able to access the path due to a bollard failure.
It’s been a long time, but 29 Old High Street (the derelict place on the right near the car park) is back! Planning application ref 17/01686/FUL is for “Partial demolition of existing house and demolition of existing garages and outbuildings. Erection of two storey side and rear extension. Provision of new access, car parking and turning area. Rebuilding of stone boundary wall fronting Old High Street.” The application is open for comments until 3 August.
Ruskin College has been criticised for abandoning its roots and its foundation by closing its international labour and trade union studies department.
Active posts on the Headington & Marston e-democracy forum this week:
It was @HeadingtonNews who first spotted that Bury Knowle Health Centre and three other local practices had taken on a new identity – Hedena Health.
Bury Knowle and Wood Farm Health Centres, Barton Surgery, and Marston Medical Centre now come under Hedena Health: https://t.co/2GCnNW6RTJ
— Headington News (@HeadingtonNews) June 29, 2017
It was picked up and reported on the local e-democracy forum.
In the current climate of creeping (some might say galloping) privatisation of NHS services this rang alarm bells. What was going on? I thought I’d try to find out.
A quick search found that Hedena Health is not a registered company, nor a registered charity, and the name is not a registered trademark. Google only seems to know about it as being linked to Silicon Practice, who are credited as the builders of the website.
This ties in with the Hedena Health website itself being registered in May this year by a Dr Steve Treadwell who has an address in Swindon. Dr Treadwell is a director of Silicon Practice. The only other Director (and Company Secretary) is a Jane Oddy.
The Oxfordshire Clinical Commissioning group (CCG) publishes a list of practices in Oxford City (see App 2 on p.12). This was last updated in February this year. It shows the practices as “Bury Knowle Health Centre, incl Wood Farm & Marston”. In an email the CCG explained that the new name is recent (June 2017), and they have not yet updated the list. There are some other changes in the pipeline so it will probably be updated in September.
The final part of the picture comes from Bury Knowle Health Centre itself. They tell me that:
We currently have four sites (Bury Knowle, Marston/JR, Barton, and Wood Farm) each of whom until recently had their own telephone number and website. This was causing confusion for patients and staff, and patients were having problem getting through by phone, as our old telephone system was out dated and couldn’t cope with the call volumes. We therefore decided to switch to a single number and website back in June, and to use a unified name for all the sites: Hedena Health. I would like to reassure you though that we remain the same people at the same places, hopefully just providing better access to our patients. There has been no change to the ownership or the management of the Practice and Silicon Practice Ltd are just the company that have provided our website. [quoted with permission.]
It seems then that Hedena Health is an umbrella name that the practices have adopted along with the new software for accessing their services, and no other changes are involved. Someone must have done their research though, for as the Headington website records in its brief history of Headington, “The name “Hedena’s dun” (a dun being a hill) was first used in Saxon times”.