New Thinking: Writing the NHS

In the first NHS hospital to be opened in 1948 by then Minister of Health Aneurin Bevan, a prize winning poet and academic has been sitting in the restaurant which serves as the canteen, persuading hospital workers to share their stories and take time to involve themselves in writing. Dr Kim Moore is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her time as NHS75 writer in residence at Trafford General Hospital has led to an anthology being published Untold Stories of the NHS

Kim Moore talks to Jade Munslow Ong alongside Kim Wiltshire, who works with the Lime Arts charity to roll out projects like this in healthcare settings and who has created a poetic collage about working in the NHS. Dr Kim Wiltshire is Programme Leader for the BA Creative Writing at Edge Hill university in Lancashire and she has collaborated with Lime Arts as an artist and project manager over 20 years https://www.limeart.org/

Kim Moore’s project Untold Stories of the NHS is a partnership with Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust (MFT), MFT’s arts for health organisation Lime Arts, Health Education England, and Manchester UNESCO City of Literature and includes a display at Trafford General, and an exhibition in the Manchester Poetry Library running over the Summer.

Dr Jade Munslow Ong teaches literature at the University of Salford and is a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker

Producer: Nancy Bennie

This New Thinking conversation is a part of a series of 5 episodes of the Arts and Ideas podcast marking the 75th anniversary of the NHS focusing on new research in UK universities which explores links between the arts and health. It is made in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI. You can find out more on their website https://www.ukri.org/councils/ahrc/ and if you want to hear more there is a collection called New Research on the website of BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking programme https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0144txn or sign up for the Arts and Ideas podcast on BBC Sounds