Designing and delivering a poetry workshop for clinician well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic: A case study

Facilitated poetry writing workshops are used in healthcare settings as a therapeutic approach to address stressful factors that negatively influence clinician well-being. However, owing to the novelty of this intervention and a tendency to combine poetry with other types of narrative-based techniques, proponents of poetic medicine are calling for harmonization across programs in the US. This would facilitate the study of poetry in medicine and the multiple facets of well-being it is said to promote. To address these points, we partnered with a well-established poetry center to develop and study a facilitated poetry writing workshop program for palliative care and emergency medicine clinicians during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our qualitative aim was to describe how the workshop provided a creative outlet for the sharing and processing of clinician experiences. We conducted a multiple-case study of six workshop sessions using transcripts, model poems, writing prompts, and participant-created poems to describe the program's structure and processes. Our workshop contained the core components of reading, writing, and reflection; however, our program was unique in its inclusion of a website and a pre-writing component. The facilitator's instruction on and fostering the use of poetic technique coupled with website interaction were key promoters of participant engagement with their peers in the processing of complex experiences and related emotions. Healthcare systems seeking to incorporate poetry into their wellness programming may build upon our findings to create flexible workshops suited to their clinician audience and program intent.