Improving Me, the NHS women’s health and maternity programme for Cheshire and Merseyside, is currently delivering a series of potentially powerful projects supporting women’s health and wellbeing and encouraging their active involvement in tackling health inequalities experienced by women across the region. I am delighted to be playing a professional supporting role, advising on evaluation research activities that will evidence the impact of this work for participating women and communities.
The Improving Me partnership is committed to promoting the value of arts and creativity in women’s wellbeing, which is reflected in a portfolio of commissioned creative programmes, including the Lullaby project delivered by Live Music Now, which is having a transformative impact on women’s perinatal mental health and wellbeing, and the pioneering Holding Time project, which uses visual imagery and storytelling to share women’s experiences of breastfeeding. The 51% – a new programme of therapeutic writing workshops for women launches this week, covering topics relating to reproductive health throughout the life course. Facilitated by Dr Rachel New, a writer, presenter, creative producer and podcaster, in collaboration with Liverpool libraries, the programme aims to reduce taboos and stigma about women’s health and ultimately normalise these important conversations. The full six-week programme covers the following themes:
It’s a bloody mess! The first workshop is dedicated to periods. The pain, the inconvenience, the concerns, the impact, and, well, sometimes the joy! Women will share and write about their experiences, from heavy bleeding to menopause and everything in between.
Am I the only one? In this session women will have the opportunity to explore some of the more distressing, embarrassing, life-impacting problems they’ve had with their reproductive cycle, including endometriosis and fertility issues.
Making babies – or not. The third week is all about reproduction, women’s experiences of getting pregnant, being pregnant, years of trying to get pregnant, and years of trying not to get pregnant. This will be a powerful session and great care will be taken with the women in exploring these topics.
Your body isn’t your own. Continuing from last week’s session the women will discuss and write about being pregnant, giving birth and breastfeeding. For some women this will be a huge topic they may want to stay with into the next session. For some women this will be a very difficult conversation and it will be handled with great sensitivity, with a range of extra prompts and tools for women who need them.
When you stop seeing red. This week is all about menopause and perimenopause. The shock of it creeping up on you, the myriad of symptoms, the strange ways in which it throws your life off course, and the light at the end of the tunnel. For women who have not reached this point yet it’s a fantastic opportunity for learning and very cathartic for the women who are in it or past it.
Show and tell. The final session will offer space to review the work that’s been created, and women will share the positives and negatives of the discussions and the different writing tools and techniques. The last hour of this session will be for women to share the work they most connected with over the five preceding workshops.
Alongside my professional interests in the social value of arts and cultural work, this project is resonating with me more personally as a middle-aged woman recovering from a recent hysterectomy. In the first few weeks of my convalescence, I thought a lot about how my Mum had responded to the same procedure 10 years earlier, with such (almost immediate) grace and resilience that the world outside our family would have had no idea that she was recovering from major surgery. Thoughts also turned to the Mum of one of my oldest friends, who recently had a full mastectomy in treatment for breast cancer, with two successive reconstruction surgeries. I commented to my friend in a WhatsApp exchange on how having to endure this at an age when she just wants to be quietly left alone seems particularly unfair. My wise friend responded, expressing her anger and frustration that “the words mastectomy, hysterectomy and caesarean roll off the tongue as if they are small operations. We are expected to just go about our business quietly and get on with it. They are major operations but seem to be treated so casually at times.”
Through its clinical services and community-based activism, the all-woman team behind Improving Me aims to change the narrative, empower all women to raise their own voices and make our workplaces and society at large pay attention. More power to them.