Owen Sheers Faber & Faber, 2019, PB, 128pp, £8.99, 978-0571348084
All medical graduates in Scotland are provided with a volume of poems1 with the intention of giving them an insight into the humanities, human circumstance, their role, and their wellbeing.
Poetry can create the most impact in the shortest time and using the least words. Employing rhythm, metre, and rhyme, it grips the reader’s interest, offering short episodes of respite — ideal for the frantically complex, difficult, and rapid first years of medicine, encouraging the medical graduates ‘to open the eyes to one’s own heart’.2
To Provide All People could be distributed in the same way to all juniors in the UK and read by everyone in the NHS at this current time of low morale. Owen Sheers has written his prose poem in a single, easily transportable volume, the content of which was originally released as a BBC Wales television programme but, interestingly, not on national BBC. He and his family have been cared for by the NHS and he has taken the time to talk to those who work in it. He reflects their lives with clarity and insight so that reading any page or even a paragraph offers understanding and reflection. Describing the birth of the NHS, he recognises the shared and integrated importance of physical and mental health care for both patients and those who work for the NHS.
I thought of highlighting sections to pass on to colleagues but soon realised that every line can be highlighted: ‘The NHS is there for when the pattern breaks, isn’t it? When the day we expect, the day we are living, Whoever you are, takes a turn we didn’t see coming.’
Based on conversations he has had, Sheers involves us all — medical, nursing, clerical, ancillary, and patient. He uses poetic economy to describe the journey of the NHS through history, using the analogy of the life events we all experience.
While so clearly describing the dilemmas and difficulties in NHS care he pleads openly, powerfully, and effectively for its continuation, although readers will understand more the low morale among NHS workers.
There is an offer of words that might help to improve it: ‘You take away too much of the original idea, and you alter the personality … the psychological aspect, the philosophical even, once that’s broken … real pain, in my experience, the kind that makes you cry, is psychological … I can tell you how to heal a fracture in a bone but a fracture to a soul? That’s harder.’
At one of his public readings I suggested that Owen Sheers should be Minister of State but he indicated it might be an improbable career move, so, if we cannot have him as Minister, let us have him as the Profession’s Poet and aim for his words to have the same level of influence on the further progression of our NHS. In his own words, he is: ‘someone who could imagine the journey and in imagining, make it happen.’
- © British Journal of General Practice 2019
