Liz Cadogan who until April 2007 was the Arts in Health Lead at the SHA. It is through my conversations with her about how we could use arts in and for addressing end of life care issues in training and to develop stories for supporting individuals that led to an unfolding process for this piece of work. This culminated in an application to the Arts Council for some funding. This process took over a year, but Liz’s enthusiasm and expertise in the artists’ world and support for the proposal process was just great.

Alongside this Manjula Patel, Manager of Bridges Support Service and myself were members of a national group, ‘Well being in Dying’, where we were exploring some practical steps that might improve end of life care experiences. Manjula raised issues about the small number of ‘voices’ and ‘stories’ from the public that were available to or accessible by all members of the public. 

Bridges as stated earlier are committed to the use of narrative as their underpinning way of working with their clients, so it was not surprising that Bridges would be keen to be major players in this piece of work. And of course Manjula’s input to this piece of work has been a shining light and we really could not have achieved what we have without her dedication to this cause of people’s stories being heard and shared.  

Manjula thanks the Bridges and Sandwell Hospice at Home team for helping to recruit the participants to the project and Jennifer and Michelle for transcribing the tapes.

Through Liz and with Manjula, we then employed Maria Whatton as our professional storyteller.  So began the work as the project team to undertake this very new and we think quite innovative way of approaching the development of a community story for and about end of life.  

Maria has been a delight. Her knowledge of stories, their roots, how to use them, tell them and how to generate a new one fit for our experiences in the twenty-first century is truly wonderful.  

Maria then brought the expertise of Anne Kinnaird into the story collecting and formatting process. Anne is another professional artist who works in a range of media. So Anne brought another dimension to our work. Her eagerness to be part of the work, her interest in and support of the work made her a very welcome team member.             

Then of course many thanks to Jovian Productions, the arts production company that took our idea and work and translated this for us.     

As for funding support I would like to thank NHS West Midlands, the Arts Council, Bridges Support and Pan Birmingham Palliative Care Network (See  www.birminghampalliativecare.nhs.uk)  

And finally, last but not least, enormous thanks to the participants who we have thanked in various ways in the introduction to this book. Thank you to Gill Reed, Barbara Pardon, Dot Short, Sheila Spencer, Babs Panton, Bob Bloomer, Doreen Keeling, Angela Thompson, Kay Green and Baksho Johal.

Life, living and dying really is something we all share! 

Pauline Smith
End of Life Care Lead NHS West Midlands
May 2008

Bridges Support Service

Bridges is a supportive care service supporting people living with cancer and palliative care needs in Sandwell and parts of Birmingham. The service is a bridge to access services from health, social and community organisations and where there are gaps Bridges provides appropriate support. Bridges is managed by Murray Hall Community Trust, a registered charity www.murray-hall.co.uk.     

The development of the Bridges service has intrinsically been linked to patients and carers stories. Bridges has also pioneered the ‘Narrative Based Assessments’ to enable the service to provide tailored support based on the patient’s story.