Blog Post | Oxfordshire Community Health and the Humanities
Medical Humanities Blog Post
Medical Humanities Blog Post
Oxfordshire Community Health and the Humanities
Tuesday 2 July 2024
In July 2024, TORCH hosted an interdisciplinary workshop on humanities approaches to community health in Oxfordshire. The University’s most recent policy document on local engagement Beyond Town and Gown (2024) highlights that, while significant steps have been taken toward sustained regional community engagement on the part of the University, work remains. As it notes “many local residents living within a couple of miles of central Oxford have almost no interaction with the University and may not feel welcome or included. Some of our students may spend years living in the city without
venturing beyond central Oxford.” Research which centres local stakeholder priorities, and which effectively nuances the social, political and cultural context to the region, is one key way the University can serve the area. Health humanities especially has the potential to play a critical role in this. Oxfordshire is still a remarkably unequal region when it comes to health; while broadly, the county has good health outcomes, a marker of its overall social and economic affluence, stark health inequalities remain; the gap in life expectancy between some Oxfordshire wards, for example, is as wide as fifteen years, and ten Oxfordshire wards fall within the 20% most deprived in England. Attended by local community groups, researchers and policy-makers, this workshop put local health at its discursive centre and introduced two health humanities projects supported through TORCH: Oxford Health Histories and Oxfordshire Health Humanities.
Oxford Health Histories began in 2022 after receiving a grant from the John Fell fund, with further financial support from the Medical Humanities Program and Community History hub. The project identified a gap in visible, accessible local histories of healthcare here in Oxfordshire, particularly those relating to the experiences of non-medical health professionals, patients and communities. Its methodological approach has been built on community and oral history as well as a concern to explore histories which can help us understand the distinctive health infrastructures of Oxfordshire. Increasingly it has also seeded co-produced forms of history. The project was introduced by its PI Sally Frampton, who spoke about the wide range of materials available on the Oxford Health Histories website. This includes blogs and articles covering a wide range of topics, such as the history of Littlemore County asylum, student mental health in the twentieth century, early modern anatomy and the history of Luther GP surgery, Oxfords primary care practice for those experiencing homelessness. The website also has an oral history repository and a collection of poetic responses to some the stories uncovered. Also detailed were two co-produced projects with local stakeholders; a film about the history of the Warneford psychiatric hospital made with Oxfordshire Recovery College and a report on the history of people with learning disabilities in Oxfordshire, organised and researched by members of My Life My Choice.
Next up were Chlo Williams and Lunan Zhao from Uncomfortable Oxford, who discussed their collaboration with Oxford Health Histories. One notable outcome of this this was the production of series of workbooks based on the website, allowing secondary school students to explore local histories of anatomy, penicillin and mental
health. The workbooks encourage thinking about the different ways we can view the history of medicine, all while thinking about stories from our own city. The penicillin workbook, for example, invites students to reflect on why not everyone in the Oxford medical team responsible for its innovation is listed on the blue plaques celebrating its discovery, opening discussion on the role of women and lab workers in science and research. Following this, we heard from Yewande Okuleye, on her experience writing poetry and soundscapes based around the Littlemore Hospital, reflecting on what poetry might bring to history that the archive can’t. The final speaker on the project was Amy Moore, who discussed the plague in early modern Oxford and what this can tell us about the history of public health in the city. Amy’s research complicates our understandings of a neat binary between “town and gown” as a historical entity in Oxford; as she discussed in her talk, public health responses to the plague show high levels of co-operation between the University and city authorities.
The second half of the workshop focused on Oxfordshire Health Humanities. Led by Erica Charters, with key research support from postdoctoral researcher Yuxin Peng, the project began in 2024 as a collaboration between the Medical Humanities program and Oxfordshire County Council. Mixing methods from medical history, community history, economics, medical anthropology, and public health, the project evaluates two community health programmes: Community Health Development Officers and Well Together, which have provided funding to community groups in the the ten priority wards of Oxfordshire. (Abingdon Caldecott, Banbury Cross and Neithrop, Banbury Grimsbury and Hightown, Banbury Ruscote, Barton & Sandhills, Blackbird Leys, Littlemore, Northfield Brook, Osney & St Thomas, and Rose Hill & Iffley) as a way of tackling health inequalities. Already yielding important research, phase one has demonstrated through ethnographic and historical research, the necessity of ‘rooted research’ by local government, universities and policymakers that focuses on long-term and equitable collaborations with local partners, in contrast to constant cycles of ‘new’ policy initiatives which can inhibit community trust. Phase two is ongoing and will focus more closely on community experience of health initiatives.
At the same time, the workshop also provided an overview of the range of research that is conducted at the University of Oxford on community health, drawing particularly on humanities methodologies. Andrew Dunning, the R.W. Hunt Curator of Medieval Manuscripts at the Bodleian Library, spoke on his research into Saint Frideswide and the nature of health care in medieval Oxford; Margaret Melling, studying at Oxford Brookes while also serving as Health Improvement Practitioner at Oxfordshire County Council outlined Oxfordshire’s programme for Local Area Coordination; while Sanjana Choudhury, DPhil candidate in NDORMS explained her research into communicating clinical trial results to patients. Members of Population Ageing’s Healthy Ageing Community Hubs project, Oxfordshire Public Health, and groups working with Healthwatch Oxfordshire, Community First Oxfordshire, and Oxfordshire Community and Voluntary Action were also in attendance and shared insights.
The workshop demonstrates the critical role health humanities can play in contemporary questions of community health. A methodologically nuanced analyses of local health policy that considers its long-term context, and absorbs both qualitative
and quantitative methods, is the best way to understand current challenges around health inequalities and shape new directions to addressing them.
Sally Frampton, Humanities and Healthcare Fellow
