Menopause Poetics (1-hour webinar)

Title: Menopause Poetics - reframing the menopause experience through creative approaches to menopause testimonies in healthcare education

Facilitator: Dr Helen Foster – Creative Writing Associate, Stoneygate Centre for Empathic Healthcare.

This 1-hour free webinar is open to everyone. A MS Teams link and joining instructions will be provided to delegates by email before the event.

About the session:

This lunchtime learning session explores how creative approaches to presenting first-hand menopause testimonies can enrich healthcare education by bringing attention to the emotional, social and embodied dimensions of women's experiences.

Menopause Poetics is a creative health project that draws on testimonies from menopause oral history archives and explores the process of creative collaboration with women living with menopause. The project has developed a series of poetry films that offer a different way of engaging with lived experience. This session will explore what these creative resources can contribute to healthcare education and person-centred practice.

A poetry film is a short audiovisual form that combines spoken word, text, sound and moving image to evoke the emotional and imaginative dimensions of lived experience. Situated within the fields of medical humanities and creative health, the project uses poetry film to communicate aspects of menopause that are often difficult to capture through clinical language or symptom-focused descriptions alone.

Using examples from the project, the session will demonstrate how poetry films can foreground women's voices and experiences in all their complexity, creating space for perspectives that extend beyond medical accounts of menopause. It will also consider the potential and limitations of using creative representations of lived experience in healthcare education and explore how arts-based resources might support reflection, discussion and more person-centred approaches to care.

Learning outcomes

By the end of the session, participants will have gained a greater understanding of:

• how poetry film and other creative approaches can be used to communicate first-hand experiences of menopause;
• the opportunities and challenges of using lived-experience narratives and creative representations within healthcare education;
• the potential of arts-based resources to support reflection, discussion and person-centred approaches to menopause care.

Booking deadline: 30 June 2026

If you have any questions about the 'Lunchtime Learning' webinar series contact us on empathy@le.ac.uk, or visit our webpage.

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