Found poetry: a creative approach to explore the lived experiences of blood testing

• Lead: Dr Jessica Watson, University of Bristol

Blood tests are commonly used in general practice. Understanding blood tests is important for patients to help them to become partners in their care and manage their health. It is also important for patient safety; if abnormal tests are not followed up by this could lead to a delay in diagnosis. 

Our research has shown that patients do not always know what tests they have had done and why.2 3 Patients can find it difficult to get their test results and are not always told what their results mean, this can lead to anxiety and frustration for patients. It can lead to extra workload for GPs and primary care staff dealing with follow up phone calls from patients with queries about their tests. 

The NHS is planning to allow all patients to have access to their test results online, however these test results are not provided in a patient centered way, and this could exclude people who do not have access to the internet. 

Patient engagement and co-production are crucial to develop future research to improve test communication. The overall aims of this project are:

• To explore how poetry can be used in a creative way to engage the public in research
• Create an alternative way in which the voices of underrepresented people can be heard by the research community
• To engage a diverse group of participants with lived experiences of medical testing in research to improve test communication

We will do this through three poetry workshops, engaging underserved communities. We have already successfully piloted this approach with great success at a weekly community coffee morning (attended mostly by women of Somali and Caribbean heritage) in the Barton Hill/Lawrence Hill, an area of relatively low socioeconomic status in Bristol. We will produce a film using poems created during poetry workshops to share our work in a novel and creative way with patients and researchers. Finally, we will submit a workshop or oral presentation to the SAPC conference to share our creative approach and ‘found’ poems with a wider academic audience. This novel public engagement activity will be used to underpin Dr Watson’s future Advanced Fellowship application, which aims to use co-production methods in order to develop an intervention to improve test communication.