Home From Home Verbatim Poem

During 2023 and 2024, Kim secured funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to work with MFT's Local Care Organisation, in particular with three Intermediate Care Units - Buccleuch Lodge, Crumpsall Vale and Delamere House, and a complex care unit at Dermot Murphy Close. The project explored the lived experience of the staff who work in and patients who live in these units - some for a short period of time before they can get back home, some for the rest of their lives. The project outcomes included a poetry booklet, an installation, a film and a staff led verbatim poem.

The verbatim poem saw writer Kim and musician Caro C work with 20 staff members across the four units and is called 'There Nowhere (Quite Like Home)'

There’s Nowhere (Quite Like Home)

Kim Wiltshire and Caro C

 

There’s no place like home,

Is there?

Friends, family, comfort.

You can do what you want,

When you want.

Home is where you rest your head,

It can be one room,

It can be a big mansion.

 

An Intermediate Care Unit is

Very unique.

A home from home atmosphere.

We’re more or less the middlemen.

A bridge between the hospital and home.

Rehabilitating people back into their own home

And live their best lives.

 

The patients make the work

Not Work.

You see a change in patients,

You can see them relax.

They’ve got goals,

And they achieve them.

You can see them improving,

And then they go home.

It doesn’t feel like you’ve come to work,

It’s not a chore.

I never dread coming into work.

 

The hardest part is seeing young people

Who should have had their whole lives.

When we look at their pictures

And what life they had previously.

When people can’t go home.

Managing their expectations

And family expectations.

Explaining to someone that they might not

Be able to manage

At home.

Coming to terms with a new normality.

Then waiting.

They’re waiting for a place,

Or their waiting for carers.

They’re waiting, waiting,

And there’s no certainty in that.

Sometimes its raindrops

Other days its thunderstorms.

 

We’re a family here.

We encourage people to do for themselves,

We enable them.

The outcome is to go home from here.

Letting them know there’s hope for the future.

Seeing the patients progress,

And be where they want to be.

To be part of that gives me

Great Satisfaction.

 

Home is everything to our patients usually,

But then you get the other end of the scale

Where patients don’t want to go home,

Because they’re going to be isolated.

They’ve got that social isolation,

That they’ve not had here,

It’s a massive adjustment.

 

I think for a lot of people,

Home is the safe place,

Where they can do what they like

Where they’re happy,

Most of them.

Where you feel your heart belongs.

Home is where the heart is.

 

There’s nowhere else that’s quite like home.