Hello, it's the District Nurses!

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Verbatim Poems with NHS Nurses

Across 2022 and 2023, writer Dr Kim Wiltshire (Edge Hill University) was awarded a British Academy Innovation Fellowship to work with award winning arts and health organisation Lime Arts, based at Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust (MFT) to explore embedding the arts further into NHS settings. Part of her work involved creating what she is terming 'verbatim poems'. For this, Kim worked with renowned musician, composer and sound artist Caro C (@carocsound) and together they interviewed nurses, took the recordings and created 4-5 minute sound pieces. This blog showcases both the written poems and the sound versions, which have been used across MFT for District Nurse recruitment, as well as being used in the 2023 Liverpool Being Human Festival Be My Guest, where the tracks were used by Fusion Dance to create immersive theatre experiences. You can also listen to the podcast ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0fy7702 ) Please keep an eye for more posts as we work with more
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Thoughts on the Pandemic

The Pandemic We lost a lot of patients to Covid, And a lot of our colleagues were off very very poorly With Covid. That was challenging It made us think about life.   A massive influx in patients In that last kind of period of their lives. They were seeing us more than family members, Which was distressing. We had a lot of upset patients, Quite depressed patients, They didn’t see anyone Apart from a nurse in a mask. Looked a bit like an alien coming in No touch, and all that.   They shipped everyone out of hospital And we wasn’t ready for that amount of people To be coming out. Lots of people didn’t want us Because they were scared.   They were really scared. You’re going in giving as much reassurance as you can. In hospital, it’s a clinical situation But then, when you’re sat in your home  With your feet up watching Corrie, And somebody comes in fully gowned? It reminded me of ET, When they come for ET and they’re in the Hazmat suits? It’s scary to have that when they’re walking in yo
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Hello It's the District Nurse!

  Hello! It’s the District Nurse!   ‘Hello, it’s the district nurse!’   What does it mean to be a district nurse? It means seeing people at home Empowering them Being able to provide the best care It’s anything and everything That you can do for people It’s never boring (laugh) It’s not just a nursing role We work quite independently Doing what needs to be done A district nurse also has to be  A counsellor A therapist A mother All those different kinds of roles Are part of that job.   Palliative care Multitasking Wound care Teamwork Medications Physical Feeding tubes Emotional Taking bloods Caring   ‘Oh my beautiful nurses!’   There was a little lady, lived on her own, had no family, really really nice little lady, and as you get talking, and as the girls said, you get to be part of the family. It was Easter and she used to say how much as a kid she used to love going to the shop and getting an Easter egg, and she’s not been able to do it for fifteen years because she hasn’t left the h
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