Practice-related feedback: How a patient’s poem helped staff appreciate a person-centred approach

Positive feedback reinforces lecturer practitioner Carol Forde-Johnston’s use of patients’ voices in teaching sessions

My role at Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, where I have been a lecturer practitioner for the past 18 years, focuses on the teaching and development of others. Having always been interested in arts and culture, I regularly use poetry, paintings, videos and narrative cases in my teaching.

Carol Forde-Johnston uses paintings, poems and videos in her teaching.

During one session I used a poem written by a man describing how Parkinson’s disease made him feel. The poem portrayed powerfully the person behind the ‘mask-like’ expression.

Needs of quieter patients

He wrote eloquently about how staff naturally navigated towards the more animated patients. The poem described how nurses shared a joke with other patients and how the ‘cruel jailer called Parkinson’s’ made him feel ‘imprisoned’ and ‘entombed’.