In mid-2021 The Sciku Project teamed up with the Literature and Science Hub at the University of Liverpool to run the ‘Research in Verse Poetry Competition’, open to staff and postgraduate research students across the university to submit poems about their research subject. The competition saw poems addressing all sorts of topics, ranging from gravity to slavery to life in the lab.
Dr Janette Greenhalgh’s fascinating poem using a repeating haiku structure was a notable entry:
Mammoth document
Mammoth document
Brim-full of words, so URGENT!
Fight, flight, cup of tea?
URGENT document
Mammoth in the room, storming
Kettle shrieks volumes
Words, words, words and more
Unwrap, repurpose, rebind
With fight, flight and tea
Mammoth document
Brim-full of our words. Job done!
Outside, sweet birdsong
Background
Our research is mainly commissioned by the NIHR Health Technology Assessment programme on behalf of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE). Our core work is to provide a critique of evidence submissions to NICE from pharmaceutical companies for the clinical and cost effectiveness of new drugs. We have multi-disciplinary teams working on each report (clinical effectiveness reviewer, statistician, economic modeller, clinical expert). The timelines are very short – we have 8 weeks from receipt of the evidence to submitting our critique to NICE.
Dr Janette Greenhalgh is a Senior Research Fellow with the Liverpool Reviews and Implementation Group, Department of Health Data Science, Institute of Psychology and Health. You can connect with her on Twitter here: @drjanetteg