CNWL NHS Foundation Trust is one of the largest NHS Trusts in the UK. It provides healthcare services across a wide swathe of north west London and various areas beyond.

The Trust has just announced its adoption and funding of a pamphlet of poems and photographs now available free of charge across all its waiting rooms, for people to take away with them if they want.

Two thousand copies of the pamphlet have just come back from the printers, and have begun to be distributed.

The photographs it contains are striking – both poignant and strong.

The poems have been selected from the various collections put together for the “Poems for…the wall” project over the years, described and available on this web-site. They include a significant number of bilingual poems, written originally in a non-English mother-tongue. The pamphlet will thus acknowledge and bid welcome to the multi-ethnic nature of our society and of its healthcare waiting rooms. Individuals planning to vote UKIP next year will also presumablly continue to require CNWL services and will therefore have the chance to enjoy this booklet too.

In these times of crisis for the NHS, amid so many other crises, here is a development that seems to run counter to the prevailing tide and speaks for the fullness of what the NHS is about. It reminds us that the NHS is for everyone and is as much concerned with heart and soul as with body.

The pamphlet’s production represents, and is the culmination of, years of co-operation between the Trust and the “Poems for…the wall” project. A small mental health service called Portugal Prints should also be thanked for their good and careful design work..