Developing the use of poetry within healthcare culture

Why we need more poetry in palliative care

Objectives

Although many well-known poems consider illness, loss and bereavement, medicine tends to view poetry more as an extracurricular than as a mainstream pursuit. Within palliative care, however, there has been a long-standing interest in how poetry may help patients and health professionals find meaning, solace and enjoyment. The objective of this paper is to identify the different ways in which poetry has been used in palliative care and reflect on their further potential for education, practice and research.

Methods

A narrative review approach was used, drawing on searches of the academic literature through Medline and on professional, policy and poetry websites to identify themes for using poetry in palliative care.

Results

I identified four themes for using poetry in palliative care. These concerned (1) leadership, (2) developing organisational culture, (3) the training of health professionals and (4) the support of people with serious illness or nearing the end of life. The academic literature was mostly made up of practitioner perspectives, case examples or conceptual pieces on poetry therapy. Patients’ accounts were rare but suggested poetry can help some people express powerful thoughts and emotions, create something new and feel part of a community.

Conclusion

Poetry is one way in which many people, including patients and palliative care professionals, may seek meaning from and make sense of serious illnesses and losses towards the end of life. It may have untapped potential for developing person-centred organisations, training health professionals, supporting patients and for promoting public engagement in palliative care.

A brief historical review of poetry’s place in nursing

The relationship between nursing and poetry is not necessarily obvious and may often be seen as marginal to mainstream nursing activities. This review paper seeks to examine this relationship by taking primarily an historical perspective, starting from Nightingale and the development of mainstream professional nursing. Through an indicative rather than exhaustive literature review, the ebb and flow of this relationship is traced. This provides both an overview and specific insights into the ways that poetry can manifest within nursing, highlighting some recent developments and the potential for further applications. As such the paper argues that poetry in its various forms should have more central consideration within nursing practice, education and research.

The connection between art, healing, and public health: a review of current literature

This review explores the relationship between engagement with the creative arts and health outcomes, specifically the health effects of music engagement, visual arts therapy, movement-based creative expression, and expressive writing. Although there is evidence that art-based interventions are effective in reducing adverse physiological and psychological outcomes, the extent to which these interventions enhance health status is largely unknown. Our hope is to establish a foundation for continued investigation into this subject and to generate further interest in researching the complexities of engagement with the arts and health.

Creative expressive encounters in health ethics education: teaching ethics as relational engagement

BACKGROUND

The growing expectation that health practitioners should be ethically attuned and responsive to the broader humanistic and moral dimensions of their practice has seen a rise in medical ethics courses in universities. Many of these courses incorporate creative expressive encounters--such as the exploration and interpretation of poetry, art, music, and literature--as a powerful vehicle for increasing understanding of the illness experience and to support a relational approach to ethics in health care practices.

DESCRIPTION

First-year paramedic students were invited to produce their own creative composition in response to a short vignette describing the plight of a fictional "patient-other." Our aim was twofold: first, to engage their "sympathetic imaginations" to capture a sense of illness as being not only a fracturing of bodily wellness but also, for many, a fracturing of holistic well-being, and second, to encourage an ethics of relational engagement-rather than an ethics based on the detached, intellectual mastery of moral principles and theories-within their paramedical practice.

EVALUATION

After some initial apprehension, students embraced this task, producing works of great insight and sensitivity to the embedded and embodied nature of "being." Their work demonstrated deep ethical understanding of the multiple subjective and intersubjective layers of the illness experience, displaying a heightened understanding of ethics in practice as a relational engagement.

CONCLUSION

Educationally, we found this to be an extremely powerful and successful pedagogical tool, with our students noting emotional and intellectual transformations that challenged and sensitised them to the deeper human dimensions of their practice.

A personal exploration of the power of poetry in palliative care, loss and bereavement

This article is a personal reflection and exploration of the potential of poetry in palliative care. Poetry can help enable expression of individuals' deepest unspoken concerns and may provide a means of providing spiritual care. The author draws on her personal experience as a community nurse, together with the views of patients and colleagues, and discusses the literature. Some limitations to the use of poetry are considered, as are the skills needed to help patients use poetry. To illustrate the potential therapeutic value of poetry in palliative care, examples of poems by poets, patients and the author are included. The article concludes that poetry can bring about a sense of healing, and should be considered as a possible addition to other holistic therapies.

Poetry writing and secretory immunoglobulin A

17 healthy students provided saliva samples for Immunoglobulin A (s-IgA) assay before and after sessions of either writing poetry or reading magazines (control). Levels of s-IgA increased after the poetry-writing sessions but not after reading.