Creative writing and spiritual wellbeing in palliative care patients.
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Creative writing workshops and spiritual well-being,exploring the experience of palliative care patients. A qualitative study.
IRAS ID
142614
Contact name
Jennifer Strawson
Contact email
Research summary
This study aims to explore the experience of hospice patients attending a four week creative writing course and to see if this experience relates to spiritual well-being. Part of the care we provide as a hospice is 'spiritual care. Spirituality refers to the qualities that make up our identity and sense of self, as well as the things that give our lives meaning. I intend to recruit between 6 and 10 patients, already under the care of the hospice, to attend weekly creative writing workshops, lasting an hour and a half, over a period of 4 weeks. As part of the workshops I will ask each participant to respond in writing to three statements on the theme of spiritual well-being. This will take place before the workshops start and then as part of each subsequent workshop. Creative writing is any form of writing where the purpose of the writing is to create fictional stories, places, people and to express thoughts, feelings and emotions rather than to simply convey information. The writing workshops will involve reading poetry and fiction and using themes and ideas from the written material to inspire our own writing. There will be time to share thoughts and feelings and the opportunity to share each other's writing. I plan to use any work written by participants during the workshops as data as well as the written responses to the spirituality statements. I plan to conduct semi-structured interviews in order to explore in depth the experience of participants during the workshops with a focus on spiritual well being. There have only been a handful of studies looking at the experiences of patients with terminal illness attending writing workshops (Bolton, 2007,Mcloughlin 2000, Haraldsottir, 2011, Rickett et al. 2011,) and none have looked at the connection to spiritual well being.
REC name
London - Camberwell St Giles Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
14/LO/1434
Date of REC Opinion
12 Sep 2014
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion