• RLF News
• Article

Writing For Life: A nurse’s experience

Sharlynne Datig, a recovery nurse at the Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust’s Western Eye Hospital, recently completed a writing skills workshop with Writing For Life Fellow Evie Coppard (who publishes as Yvonne Coppard). Here, Sharlynne shares her thoughts.

In my day-to-day role as a recovery nurse, I look after patients as they recover from surgery. I focus on helping keep their pain under control and supporting them as they get better.

I don’t do much writing in my role, but I am interested in expanding into research, which will require plenty of writing. I was happy to see writing courses available on LEARN (Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust’s education platform). I took the Boost Your Writing Confidence course with our writer-in-residence Evie Coppard. It was really interesting – I didn’t even notice the two hours go by!

This course helped improve my confidence and my faith in myself.

The slides were short and simple and the workshop was very interactive. We were given time to write and then to share our work with the whole group. At first it was nerve-wracking, but Evie has the skill of making everyone feel calm and at ease. I noticed a few people I knew on the course, so that also made me feel better.

Through these sharing and participation exercises, we got to learn from each other’s style. I picked up lots of good points and things to remember. I learned that we don’t need to be perfect in our writing, we just need to focus on our audience and getting them to understand our message.

I think internationally-educated nurses and staff whose first language is not English will benefit most from this course. I moved here from the Philippines in 2020, so English is not my first language. This course helped improve my confidence and my faith in myself. I’d definitely recommend others enrol in courses like this one. There are lots of resources available through LEARN. Make time for it, choose the training that suits your needs, gather the confidence and be sure to participate. You will gain a lot from taking part!

Want to know more about our Writing for Life programmes?

The Royal Literary Fund’s Writing for Life Workplace Skills programmes help people develop their workplace writing skills, improving confidence and communication. We also offer Writing for Self-Expression workshops, which can help individuals build personal awareness, resilience and wellbeing. Our partners include NHS groups, trade unions and voluntary and community sector organisations. Find out more here.

You might also like: