In Our Own Words – an innovative healthcare staff support collaboration

Wake The Beast Theatre Company have been working in partnership with the Clinical Psychology Team at the Whittington Trust since 2018, using verbatim theatre to support patients at different stages of cancer treatment. ‘The C Factor’ is our award-winning creative arts and psychology initiative devised with and for people undergoing cancer treatment, combining psychology, storytelling and applied theatre approaches to create a safe space for participants which is energising, uplifting and empowering. 

When the first lockdown came into effect in March 2020, ‘The C Factor’, along with many other non-essential healthcare services, ground to a halt.  Hospitals and healthcare providers up and down the country went into crisis mode, and extraordinary demands were made of already over-stretched staff.

Just seven weeks later, in May 2020, Wake The Beast were invited back into the Whittington to work not with patients, but with the staff themselves.

Over the course of eight weeks, we interviewed over 40 NHS staff, including porters, cleaners, Intensive Care Unit nurses and doctors. The stories the staff told were raw, painful and humbling, and resulted in ‘In Our Own Words’, a 25-minute performance which we toured to staff in collaboration with the Psychology team, who facilitated discussion after the performances. Staff were emotional but grateful; having artists engage with them validated their experiences, and performing their words back to them allowed staff a chance to reflect on what they had experienced.

Having our artists champion these unheard stories, urgently and immediately, was an important role for us to hold. Our work created an opportunity for staff to process what was happening, and provided a safe space in which to talk about some of the trauma. The performances enabled senior management to hear what their staff had been going through, and helped ensure mistakes were not repeated. 

It was clear that the hospital story was not the only one. District Nurses, Speech & Language Therapists and other Community Health practitioners were still making essential visits to people’s homes, using their bikes or walking for miles, carrying heavy PPE and medical supplies, frequently unsure of the ever-changing guidelines. Many staff were redeployed to other services. Dental Nurses, Physios and Dietitians suddenly found themselves working in positions at the epicentre of the pandemic in ICU – with very little notice or training. 

It also became obvious that the voices of Care Home staff and Black, Asian and ethnic minority staff needed their own platform, and so we created two additional pieces. Kemi Coker from Wake The Beast interviewed a further 42 staff from various ethnic backgrounds about their experience of working during the pandemic; Tonderai Munyebu wrote a script based on their words, which Sibusiso Mamba directed. 

We interviewed Care Home staff including Care Assistants, Nurses, Clinical Leads, Managers, and Housekeepers. Adam McGuigan wrote and directed ‘London Rain’, which told the very particular experiences of Care Home staff, who often felt abandoned by the government, lacking the resources that were slowly trickling through to hospitals, and excluded from official support put in place for NHS workers. The piece was toured in summer 2021 alongside the ethnic minority staff piece to five Health Centres, four Care Homes and the Whittington Hospital. 

As the pandemic progressed, other NHS Trusts reached out to Wake The Beast to develop their own staff support programmes. Our team interviewed dozens of staff from Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust, where we worked with CNWL’s Wellbeing Team to curate a Storytelling Festival as part of World Wellbeing Week in June 2021. It featured creative workshops delivered over Zoom, a specially commissioned song based on staff stories, and ten short films created by Wake The Beast using verbatim interview footage from Physiotherapists, District Nurses, Care Home staff, Rapid Response, Substance Misuse, and Offender Healthcare teams, amongst others. 

Camden and Islington NHS Foundation Trust, a mental health trust, also requested a bespoke staff support intervention. Following the Whittington project model, the team interviewed over 50 staff from across the Trust and created ‘Stories from C&I’, which toured locations in partnership with their Psychology team for two weeks in July 2021. 

We recently finished our fifth piece of theatre for the Whittington Trust, charting staff experiences of working during Covid-19 over the last two years.  In total, over the course of the pandemic and three national lockdowns, we have worked with three NHS Trusts to create ten short films and tour seven new pieces of theatre across 12 locations to hundreds of NHS and Social Care workers, supporting frontline staff wellbeing in extraordinary circumstances. 

We are proud of our team’s passion and tenacity to deliver in the most challenging circumstances, and humbled by the dedication and compassion of those whose stories we told.  We are delighted to be able to share our work for the very first time with the public.

‘In Our Own Words’ Thursday 26 May, 7pm @Jacksons Lane Theatre, N6 5AA, Live and Livestreamed: https://creativityandwellbeing.org.uk/listing/in-our-own-words-tales-from-frontline-nhs-staff/ 

‘In Our Own Words’ project film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCIGyLKooDs

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