Poems in the Waiting Room (PitWR) is a U.K.-based and registered arts in health charity. The main aim of the charity is to supply short collections of poems for patients in National Health Service General Practice waiting rooms to read while waiting to see their doctor. The aim is to promote poetry, and to make the paient's wait more pleasant. The service is free to the waiting rooms and general practice managers, and is supported by grants and donations. The poems are presented as A4 sized three-fold cards typically reproducing between six and eight poems. Batches of cards are printed and distributed to waiting rooms four times a year. Patients are invited to take the cards away with them.
An additional service provided by the charity is 'PiTWR for Hospitals'. This provides larger print-runs of the poetry cards for distribution in hospitals. These are adapted to display the hospitals own message and sponsorship details.
A key consideration for the charity is the selection of poems. Guidelines for the selection of poems have been devised with this in mind, and with help from a consultant psychiatrist as well as from poets. To quote the Editor "In a patient centred health service, poetry arts in health too needs to be patient centred. The readers are patients - the worried well and the worried sick. The poems selected draw from the springs of well-being. In time of trouble, a measure of comfort is welcome". The selection of poems is therefore different from, for example, the poetry that patients may themselves write as writing therapy. Poems selected for inclusion in PiTWR collections are a mix of contemporary work and poems from the canon of English poetry. Translations of poems from other traditions are also included. The essential is that they all contain positive images of hope, home, security, safe journey and arrival, beauty and transcendence, love and loving. The approach is indeed more akin to bibliotherapy rather than art therapy. Submissions from poets are encouraged, and a set of guidelines is provided to indicate the sort of poetry that meets the need of the charity.
In addition to the selection, production and distribution of the poetry cards the charity also undertakes research into the cost effectiveness of the scheme, and supports related arts in health initiatives. Recent work focusses on the extension of the scheme to support the production of special editions tailored for distribution in hospitals, rather than general practice waiting rooms. Collaborative work with other arts in health or literature based organisations, such as The Reader (magazine) is actively pursued.
The U.K. based charity has attracted wider attention, and encourages collaboration with projects set up in other countries, where these projects adopt the same editorial policy. Examples include Poems in the Waiting Room New Zealand established in 2008, based at Dunedin.
External link: Poems in the Waiting Room
External link: Poems in the Waiting Room(NZ)
Famous quotes containing the words poems, waiting and/or room:
“A glass of papaya juice
and back to work. My heart is in my
pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.”
—Frank O’Hara (1926–1966)
“At length he would call to let us know where he was waiting for us with his canoe, when, on account of the windings of the stream, we did not know where the shore was, but he did not call often enough, forgetting that we were not Indians.... This was not because he was unaccommodating, but a proof of superior manners. Indians like to get along with the least possible communication and ado. He was really paying us a great compliment all the while, thinking that we preferred a hint to a kick.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Consider the vice president, George Bush, a man so bedeviled by bladder problems that he managed, for the last eight years, to be in the men’s room whenever an important illegal decision was made.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)