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‗The Wounded Nurse‘ created a debate about the effect some nursing
incidents have on the nurse. To what extent would she be able to make
strong connections with her patients in future? Surely, some self protective
mechanism would lead to a detached approach to caring for other
―difficult‖ patients (Menzies-Lyth1970, Stockwell, 1972). Bile also means
anger and in our fifth co-inquiry group (9/6/05) we started to question the
presence of anger while caring for others and what effect this might have.
Could this be displaced in defensive or difficult behaviour towards others?
On reflection, I am still surprised about the powerful effect the poems had
in opening up a reflective conversation or dialogue. I sometimes see
something new in a poem which was not intended or I was not aware of at
the time of writing. For example, I seem to express the assumptions of the
dominant discourse or field unwittingly in the Ageism poem by referring to
the doctor as a man but of course she could just as easily be a woman!
This is not an easy observation to make when I consider myself a feminist!
Co-Inquiring into Practice: Using Poetry Deliberately
I described in a SOLAR 3 workshop (April 2005) how I had been unable to
engage the ward staff in setting up a co-inquiry group to meet regularly to
look at the tensions and possibilities of reflecting during care giving. This
was two weeks into the Strand 2; I was impatient, wanting to get ‗started‘
on the research ‗proper‘. I felt I had failed miserably in engaging any
interest and felt the inquiry was going badly at this stage. By now I had
begun sharing some of my poems in class and with my SOLAR PhD
colleagues. Liz from the PhD group suggested using the poems in the
ward and seeing what happened. So I put some of them on the notice
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