New opening
Bluebell View: high quality care in historic Oswestry
Oswestry in Shropshire is the location of Bluebell View – HC-One’s newly-opened luxury care home. The Care Home Environment editor Matt Seex visited the historic market town to meet with home manager Michelle Middleton Price and experience the new home
Located five miles from the Welsh border, the Shropshire town of Oswestry has been the site of human settlement since the Iron Age. Border tussles during the Middle Ages saw the town being claimed by both the English and the Welsh, and today Oswestry still has a number of Welsh-language road names to show for these historic disputes. Today a bustling market town, Oswestry is the location of HC-One’s Bluebell View, an 80-bed, state-of-the-art £12.6m home that opened in April of this year after a two-year build. I visited Bluebell View on a sunny day in early August to chat with home manager Michelle Middleton Price about her vision for the home. I also met HC-One’s area director for Bluebell View, Jodie Evans, and Sheilagh Lewis – Bluebell View’s resident liaison manager – who kindly filled me in on the history of the site where Bluebell View now stands.
A rich local history Bluebell View is located a few minutes’ walk from Oswestry town centre on a large site that – at various times – has been a local football ground (for the now sadly- defunct Oswestry Town F.C.), a social club, a gasworks (hence a bridge nearby still being referred to as the ‘gasworks bridge’ by locals), an aluminium factory, and a gutter and downpipe manufacturer. In fact, Sheilagh tells me that, back in the day, local schoolchildren were threatened by their parents and teachers alike that, if they did not do well enough at school, they could expect to find themselves working on the production line at the aluminium factory attaching handles to saucepans. The history of the site has been a definite plus for Michelle and her team, who have found that the location – particularly its sporting heritage – sparks fond memories in residents’ minds. “A lot of the local people refer back to
November 2024
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when it was a football stadium, when they came down with their grandparents, and they remember the stands,” Michelle says. Given the power of reminiscence and memory, the Bluebell View team has been keen to link the new home to the history of Oswestry and its surrounding environment. Walking around Bluebell View, I am struck by the number of photographs and pictures of local scenery and landmarks, and the references to local points of interest and historical figures, such as celebrated First World War soldier and poet Wilfred Owen, who was born in the town in 1893, and after whom one of Bluebell View’s reading rooms in named.
At the heart of the community Michelle tells me that the demographics of the town, with its growing (and relatively affluent) elderly population, make it an
ideal location for HC-One – the largest care home operator in the UK with a portfolio of 275 homes and counting. Perhaps surprisingly, given the modest size of the town and ongoing staff shortages across the sector, recruiting staff to the Bluebell View team has, I am told, not been a problem. Weekly fees at Bluebell View start at £995, rising to around £1,500 for the larger rooms, and dependent on a resident’s medical and nursing needs. In addition to long-term residency, the home also offers respite and post-operative care. When I visited, Bluebell View had 12 residents, and Michelle and Jodie are keen to point out that the emphasis will be on increasing resident numbers gradually and in a person-centred way, where every new resident feels valued and welcome. “It’s about each resident feeling special and unique,” Michelle explains. “We’re here to ensure that residents know us before we move somebody else in.”
With this in mind, Michelle and Jodie tell me that it will take around two years for the home to reach capacity. This means there is
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