From Cavendish Square to Macedonia

For the first time since I got my knee fixed in July, I cycled into central London. Fifty minutes door to door to the Kings Fund in Cavendish Square pleased me a lot - only about five minutes more than by foot and tube.

The Kings Fund is a major health charity which runs a very useful ‘Board Leadership’ programme that provides training and development for NHS trust board directors. Today’s session was on the implications of Foundation Hospitals, and particularly the Government’s intention that all acute hospitals will be in Foundation Trusts by 2008. The speaker at the seminar was Richard Lewis who has just completed a study of one of the early Foundation Trusts – the Homerton Hospital in Hackney. Having heard the evidence, I think it’s fair to say that most of us still felt “the jury was out” on the claimed benefits of foundation status. Richard’s report on Homerton can be downloaded from the Kings Fund website at http://www.kingsfund.org.uk/resources/publications/putting_health_1.html

Came back to the Borough for a meeting of the Council’s Constitution Review Group – better known as “the anoraks working party”. And yes, it is true that the group meeting would have been incredibly boring to anyone other than those of us who are sad enough to spend an afternoon looking at the Council’s constitution and procedures. However, this doesn’t mean that it isn’t important – an up to date democratic constitution is a key to ensuring that we Councillors can effectively represent local people and their interests.

I ended the night at the West London Trade Union Club (WLTUC), for one of our regular nationally themed evening. Tonight was a Macedonian evening, organised by one of the Club’s Committee members who comes from the former Yugoslavian republic. Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised that I was more interested in the macedonian beer than the arts and culture presentations.

Beers from Skopje (front) and Oxfordshire at the WLTUC


Got home to discover that the leaflets have now been delivered confirming the change of day for collection of the green boxes for recycling (see my post on 7th October). Unfortunately this was too late for a number of residents who had put their boxes out mistakenly this morning – but hopefully this is now the last week this will happen.