Thursday 08-05-2025 - 14:32

Poetry and Nursing may not be two words you commonly hear put together but, over in the Faculty of Health, Social Care and Medicine, Jane Rooney who is the head of Children’s Nursing, Midwifery, Mental Health and Learning Disability Nursing has found a way to do it.

Through using the creativity of poetry as an alternative method of gaining student feedback, Jane has managed to get insightful feedback and experiences of student nurses currently on an undergraduate programme.  

Jane commented: “Student nurse experience and feedback whilst on programme is really important and is how we work together to make changes and improvements.  By using an alternative method, allowing students to express themselves in a different way through poetry, we can deepen our understanding of how it is to be a nursing student here at Edge Hill”  

As a student nurse myself, it can be difficult to give feedback on our experiences because sometimes it's so hard to put into words. I have had times where I don’t want to talk about it – not because it’s bad, this journey has been invaluable but, we can experience things that are difficult. Alongside this, we must ensure we remain confidential, we cannot just talk about “what happened at work” so to speak – we have people to protect.  

Therefore, using alternative methods of feedback such as poetry allows us to express those emotions, views and feelings in a way that is both appropriate but also in a way that allows us to process what has gone on, too. It allows us to relate and engage with one another, because even if we may not speak about the same situation, we can relate to how that experience felt to us.  

Listening to some of the poetry that Jane supported student nurses with, I got emotional myself. I knew what it was like to feel the things in those poems, and I felt like I could reflect on my journey as a student nurse on a much deeper level. Reading them felt like accessing my own journal, and it encouraged me to utilise writing poetry of my experiences in practice to process and de-stress myself. I found the process cathartic.  

One thing I really valued too, is that these poems could be read and understood by those not in healthcare, who do not know what it is like to do what we do in our roles and to me, that is the most important thing.  

I spoke at a conference with WonkHE recently, around the ‘secret life of a student nurse’, and one of my messages was that I did not expect people to understand what it is like to work in healthcare and what it is like to be in the process of becoming a nurse. However, I put together something similar to Jane’s initiative myself to share in that conference, and that’s when people's faces changed. You could see that by using poetry, I could access relatable emotions and experiences.  

I am really looking forward to seeing more of the use of poetry to gain insightful feedback and experiences of healthcare students and can see it becoming a vital tool for this, including in research.  

We will be catching up with Jane soon to capture some of this poetry, and I am excited for it to be shared with you all.