These Are The Hands

Edited by Deborah Alma & Dr Katie Amiel

This anthology offers a unique insight into the real experiences of the people at the heart of the NHS – from the student nurse at the start of his career to the heart surgeon on the eve of her retirement.

The anthology grew out of The Bigger Picture, a project using arts and humanities to support healthcare professionals’ wellbeing. Alma and Amiel invited submissions from clinical and non-clinical NHS staff—nurses, porters, doctors, cleaners, lab workers, administrators—giving them a creative outlet and a public platform. The title comes from Michael Rosen’s poem “These Are the Hands,” originally written for the NHS’s 60th anniversary, which also appears with a foreword.

The poems cover birth, illness, mental health, emergency care, and end of life, as well as behind-the-scenes work like lab analysis and cleaning. Reviews emphasize their emotional range: tenderness, grief, anger, exhaustion, humor, and pride co-exist, offering an unsentimental, sometimes raw portrait of life inside hospitals, GP surgeries, ambulances, and community services.