Nurse Molly aims to use poetry to help us all get back to full health

Molly was already a poet and spoken word performer when she felt a calling to work for the NHS, and she went on to study at Greenwich University.

She was asked to read one of her poems, Nursing The Nation, at a conference of nurses and other health professionals.

It went viral on YouTube, and is now well on the way to having 400,000 views.

That has led to meeting the Queen at an evening of poetry celebrations, having her first book of poetry published, and hundreds of thousands of fans around the world.

Molly’s next mission is to use poetry to help us all back to good health.

“I had put the poem online, and I got a call from the Royal College of Nursing, asking if I wanted to come up to their annual congress in Liverpool and read it,” recalls 27-year-old Molly.

“It sounded good, but I wasn’t aware there would be 5,000 people there!

“I was very nervous, but when I got home, I checked how many people had viewed the video of it on YouTube.

“Each morning, it would have gone up tens of thousands more and I couldn’t believe it. I loved the messages that go with all those views, as they have all been positive.

“And to then get to meet the Queen and shake hands with her, that was an experience!”

Molly thought there may be a backlash, as her poem had a go at the media for their treatment of her beloved NHS.

“I really think everybody in the UK is united in their feelings about the NHS,” Molly enthuses.

“We all want to protect it — we all feel proud of it.

“Even patients who come in, having never been in hospital before, tell us: ‘Wow, I was really frightened because of what they say in the media — I’ll die if I go in at the weekend, the care will be

awful — and I’ve found completely the opposite.’

“So I think it is really important for healthcare workers to speak out sometimes about what it’s really like. I’m trying to do it with poetry.

“I’ve been writing poetry for about 15 years, and I studied English Literature and Creative Writing at university,” Molly explains.

“I did lots of gigs and performances, when I was a care worker for people with dementia.

“I adored it, it was the best job I ever had, but I wanted to do more. I decided to retrain as a nurse, and it all just came together when I got frustrated with what I was seeing.

“That was when I wrote poetry about it. Now, I would love to think that poetry could be used more in hospitals.

“I’d love to set up workshops for long-stay patients, get some poets to come in and work with them — that would be so therapeutic.”

Molly’s book, Underneath The Roses Where I Remembered Everything is available from www.mollycasespeaks.com