Bleeding and Belonging is a digital poetry collection, produced through research at Brighton and Sussex Medical School (BSMS), led by Dr Rich Gorman, Assistant Professor in Ethics and Social Science, in collaboration with the charity Local Families with Bleeding Disorders.
The collection is available to read online.
The research was supported by generous funding from the Centre for Arts and Wellbeing at the University of Brighton, and facilitated by poet Dawn Gorman.
Bleeding disorders, which include conditions such as haemophilia and von Willebrand disease, are inherited conditions with wide-ranging impacts on health, care, and family life.
The research project involved using poetry to try and understand more about the hopes, expectations, and worries of people affected by bleeding disorders. The poems were collected in a digital collection that reflect on the emotional, social, and lived realities of living with a bleeding disorder, exploring how families make sense of both inheritance and identity, whilst navigating uncertainty and resilience.
Dr Gorman explains: “The poems in Bleeding and Belonging give us a better understanding of the emotional, social, and cultural aspects affecting families. I hope that highlighting these dimensions can help us to support efforts to develop more sensitive, patient-centred, bleeding disorders care.”
The research builds on expertise at BSMS that focusses on exploring how creative, arts-based, and participatory approaches can help us understand people’s experiences of health, care, and medicine.
The poetry was also featured in a recent podcast ‘Veins, Verse, and Voices’, where participants discussed their experiences of taking part and exploring life with bleeding disorders through poetry.