Creative piece - Poetry of Preventative Care: Poems from research interviews with healthcare professionals and patients

I present short poems based on research interviews carried out as a part of an ethnographic study of cardiovascular disease prevention in English general practice (approved by an NHS Research Ethics Committee). These poems arose out of my need (as researcher) to make sense of huge quantities of interview data — conversations in which I and the participant discussed all kinds of issues and concerns whilst trying to piece together the activities involved in preventative care. Short pieces of poetry became a reflexive way of both actively listening to, and distilling, participants’ accounts. I stuck closely to participants’ own words and attempted to be faithful to the overall messages which I thought were coming through in their accounts.    Using the ‘method of enquiry’ described as institutional ethnography, which foregrounds “the actualities of people’s everyday lives and experiences” (Smith, 2005), the poetry enabled me to particularly highlight the ‘work’ carried out by healthcare professionals and patients in (and around) preventative interactions. As highlighted in the pieces presented, this was often emotional work which revealed tensions between the participant’s own knowledge of the support needed in order to make improvements to their health, and the knowledge which was embedded in institutional policies and structures for delivering preventative care. For example, in the sample poem submitted (entirely constructed from a GP’s own words), the participant is pulled between hitting preventive targets for managing population health as stipulated by the QOF and the CCG, and responding to individual patients’ needs as they present in frontline practice.    I have showed the poem submitted here to the GP whose words I had used. He felt that it encapsulated and expressed something important — something which he felt he would not have been able to articulate in such a powerful way. This poster presents this poem, and several other short poems, as a creative way of generating discussion about preventative care practices. I hope that, for some readers, the poems may provide an accessible, and emotionally engaging, opportunity to consider the experiences of healthcare professionals and patients, and their interactions in frontline clinical practice.

Hitting Targets

I love hitting targets

I’m really good at hitting targets

It’s important that you hit the targets

That’s how you’re perceived

And we can do it.

I feel torn

I want to hit the targets, I want to be a patient-centred GP

Oh shit, my diabetic figures are really bad

We’re coming to the end of the year

I must sort out a few more people

I’m tempted

She wanted to talk about her anaemia

The nurse appointments are fully booked, it was now or never

It comes up in pink boxes, it’s like someone shouting

I hate myself for doing it

I stuck her on the bloody couch

Her pulses were fine

It wasn’t in the slightest bit appropriate

I wanted to hit our figures

She would be another one towards the target