Journal of Research 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.

Duoethnography is a method of dialogical reflection that combines different voices and juxtaposing worldviews in order to glean fresh perspectives on wider social or professional issues. In this paper we use poetry to support an inter-professional duoethnographic exploration of sensitive issues in nursing and healthcare. Using a method of linked tanka poetry, we bring together perspectives from our respective work in nursing and occupational therapy to explore the sensitive issues of loss, death, dementia, cultural conflict and trauma. We demonstrate collaborative poetry writing as a novel, useful approach in duoethnography, demonstrating how tanka poems – short, structured poems originating from 7th-century Japan – are effective in supporting reflexive dialogue. Drawing on theoretical underpinnings and practical experience, we highlight the opportunities and challenges of using tanka poetry to facilitate collaborative discussion and problem-solving. We highlight how tanka could support difficult conversations between practitioners, researchers, service users, educators and students through its succinct immediacy. Moreover, by showcasing the use of collaborative poetry writing as a method of inquiry, this paper offers a novel methodological contribution to the broader area of qualitative research for education, research and practice.

An autoethnographic stance has been taken in this paper as this methodology can be particularly useful when exploring complex feelings and unique lived experiences. The purpose of this paper is to use this stance to holistically explore a nursing journey writing poetry during times of personal and professional difficulty, with cathartic benefits. It is hoped this will provide an example and tool for other nurses to expand their learning, insight and understanding. Poems will be used as data in this paper, and data analysis and a reflective narrative and literature exploration described to help analyse their meaning. This may stimulate an empathetic understanding in the reader and give an in-depth insight into the challenging role of the children’s nurse. Poetry will be used to explore some of the typical features of autoethnography, namely self-portrayal, context, and culture with self-reflection, and by providing poetry that encourages reader exploration. Poetry has the potential to benefit nursing, including enhanced self-awareness and coping mechanisms as well as the development of empathy to support patients, families and colleagues. The use of personal poetry with reflective narrative provides an illuminating expansion of the experiences described, which may encourage readers to explore their own emotions and reflect in new and different ways.

Living with chronic illness can lead to a spiral of losses including social capital, mobility, physical health and self-worth. One method of coping with a long-term condition is normalcy: psychological bracketing of the illness as a means of coping, and may include the embodiment of treatment as part of the norm. This paper explores the concept of normalcy in young people with cystic fibrosis, disseminated through poetry. The theme of normalcy emerged in a study exploring the experiences of young ‘expert patients’ in partnership with their healthcare team. Observations of outpatient consultations between 10 young people with cystic fibrosis (CF), two carers and the CF team (n = 11) and subsequent interviews were undertaken to explore perceptions of partnership. Once findings emerged from the original study these were recrafted into poems as an alternative means of dissemination. The poetry from ‘what’s in a norm?’ reflects the young people’s voices and the writer’s interpretation of how normalcy has become embedded into their ways of being. Minimising the impact of CF in this sample was commonplace. Normalcy as a concept emerged strongly in young people with CF in this study. Almost exclusively young people viewed the range of treatments and symptoms as not significant. Further probing revealed a very different picture, one of heavy treatment burden and symptom management. Normalcy may serve as a positive means of coping with the burden of disease. Dissemination of research findings through poetry can enhance nurses’ empathic understanding and provide holistic interpretation of events rather than just summative findings.

Despite agreement that end-of-life conversations should happen early on in the illness trajectory, it is widely acknowledged that healthcare practitioners often engage in these conversations when death is imminent or avoid the conversation altogether. Healthcare practitioners’ feelings of distress influence how end-of-life conversations are approached, yet thorough exploration of this emotional experience and its impact are largely missing from the literature. The aims of this preliminary scoping literature review using poetic inquiry were to examine physicians’ and nurses’ emotional distress in their accounts of how they approach end-of-life conversations, and to map key concepts relevant to exploring barriers to these conversations. The poetic findings highlight the differing nature of distress for physicians and nurses. Physicians’ distress appears to stem from adhering to their role of ‘curer’ when communicating with terminally ill adult patients at the end of life, whereas the sources of nurses’ distress appear to be interprofessional hierarchies and conflicts. Future research and training that uses methods to decentre and disrupt hierarchies and ingrained practices will be important to nursing practice and in improving end-of-life conversations. Arts-based approaches are one such method that could be pursued.

The aim of this study was to explore the ways in which student nurses use self-authored poems to think about important aspects of nursing practice. Being a nurse can be rewarding in that it affords opportunities to care for and communicate with others. However, it can also yield challenges, and nurses are often faced with practice filled with uncertainty, grief and loss. Our findings suggest that students can use poetry writing to meaningfully explore nursing practice, engage with critical thinking and consider the feelings of others. Of particular note were the ways in which students use metaphor to explore emotional and relational aspects of practice and the technique of self-distancing when describing difficult and angering events. The work has implications for nurse education and practice. Proactively encouraging students to adopt particular ways of expressive writing might be beneficial for student health and wellbeing. Such an approach has the potential to improve quality care provision and support the emotional health of student nurses, which might lead to a reduction in compassion fatigue, stress and attrition.

Mature students returning to education after a long absence often lack confidence, experiencing feelings of inferiority and of being unworthy of a student role in higher education institutions. The aim of this paper is to reflect upon my experience when making the transition from a mature, senior nurse to a student on a Master’s programme. My experience as a student describes this journey, using blogging and the language of poetry to articulate feelings of impostership, creating a canvas of words that draw pictures of a mind struggling to come to terms with new learning. During the learning journey I started to pen a poem, eventually called ‘Education at Sea’, which became the ensign of an academic voyage. Reflecting on this process through the use of Driscoll’s reflective model, I realised that I was experiencing what is called impostership. The conclusion asserts that higher education institutions must create cultures that enable students to openly communicate these experiences, and offer supportive scaffolded strategies to assist with transitions to and through Master’s-level learning. While this paper is directed specifically at Master’s-level learning, the recommendations may also apply to other levels of learning.

This paper describes how the medium of ‘found poetry’ is incorporated into a doctoral programme for nurses, educators and allied health and social care professionals at the start of their various doctoral journeys. It advocates a narrative practice approach to issues of researcher identity and reflexivity. ‘Finding’ the poems begins with the creation of collages as representational anchors for students to talk about themselves, their professional practice, their hopes and expectations of the doctoral experience, and their research ideas. (Re)presenting their transcribed talk as poetry involves culling and playing with words, phrases and segments, making changes in spacing, lines and rhythm to arrive at an evocative distillation (Butler-Kisber, 2002). This process enables each person to bring stories and/or fragments of experience into critical engagement with others. Poetic thinking functions pedagogically, helping students find a critical voice to enliven and hone their reflexive writing in relation to their doctoral experience and their research positioning. Arts-based methods of inquiry are an ongoing topic of interest in research communities. Found poetry is a useful starting point to explore creative means by which research participants can recount their stories, and equally, by which researchers can witness and disseminate what they have to tell.