Glasgoscopy: Creative Writing as Reflective Practice

Vicki Husband uses her poetic perspective to reflect on the practice and pedagogy of occupational therapy in her book Glasgoscopy.

For over 25 years, I have been an Occupational Therapist (OT), spending much of this time as part of a physical rehabilitation team visiting people in their homes in North-West Glasgow. As I am also a poet, I have wanted to convey something of the extraordinary nature of my job in writing for some time.

In October 2025 I published Glasgoscopy with Vagabond Voices. It took over five years to complete the work which began in the early days of the Covid pandemic. It is a book about being a brief guest in many lives; about people dealing with health issues within a city. A book about a health professional asking herself how best to be a health professional. In this essay, I reflect on the process of writing the book and what this has meant for my professional practice.

Occupational Therapy

As an occupational therapist, I work with patients on daily activities they want to be able to carry out but find difficult due to their health. This may be anything from lifting a cup, to getting up from a toilet, to making a meal or getting out of the house.

The criteria of the physical rehabilitation team that I work in includes adults who are experiencing difficulties with mobility and function due to injury, illness, or a change in a long-term condition. We are an interdisciplinary team, with a holistic, person-centred approach. The North-West health sector of Glasgow that we cover includes neighbourhoods of marked deprivation as well as affluent areas.

For an OT, the home environment is the ideal place to assess function. Occupational Therapy theory considers the physical, social, cultural, and political environments that a patient is functioning within; occupational and social justice are central theoretical frameworks. The process of writing Glasgoscopy resulted in a return to Occupational Therapy theory, ultimately influencing the book’s structure. In Glasgoscopy, the poems range in scale from rooms to local environmental issues and psycho-geographical poems journeying across the city.

The Creative Process

When beginning this project, I was initially guided by subconscious and intuition, writing around the subject to see what came out, as is the case in most creative endeavours. This stage was also interspersed with research, taking part in a writing project and a writing residency. Later came the reviewing and editing, pulling out key threads and themes, and compiling the work into a coherent whole.

Language was a theme that emerged early on in my writing process. I was involved in ‘the prescription’ project led by Dr. Gillean McDougall (McDougall (ed.) 2023), responding to archival medical material, which led me to journal articles on how language used with patients can positively or negatively affect treatment outcomes. In my own practice, I became more acutely aware of this, exploring it within the poems I was writing.

Modern poetry is extremely versatile, utilising and playing with all the tools that language has to offer. It can encompass different registers—from formal to colloquial, including medical language and technical jargon. In Glasgoscopy language becomes the subject itself.

Two poems that bookend the book, ‘Prefixes’ and ‘Suffixes’, play on Latin & Greek meanings to highlight the gap between medical language and the people—the bodies—that it describes. Similarly, ‘Clinic room’ is a series of medical abbreviations that forms a narrative of sorts to those that understand them. To those who don’t, it appears as a series of incoherent symbols and letters. At the end of the book ‘References’ plays with urban health research titles.

In the community, the health professional can be a bridge between the more formal institutions of hospital, clinic and health centre, and the private space of the home. Language registers differ in different settings, and I aimed for this to be reflected in the poems.

Patients, Perspective, and Personal Experience

During the process of writing the book,writing about patients turned out to be the most difficult part. I was keen to avoid any appropriation of stories, deliberately excluding details that appeared as sensationalism or entertainment. Even though I was creating fictional patients, it was important to me to be respectful of the experiences I was depicting.

Early on I started writing fragments of remembered encounters with patients: phrases, moments, situations from previous years that had stuck with me. I made changes to key identifying details and collaged different memories together to create anonymised prose poems, each of which I called ‘Room’.

The ‘Room’ poems are all one paragraph, in square or rectangular text boxes. These were intended to visually symbolise the anonymous, isolated rooms across the city that I visited. Anonymous, both for reasons of confidentiality but also to represent the often unseen lives within these rooms. This idea developed during the early part of the Covid 19 pandemic when I was one of few people allowed to visit homes.

While the COVID 19 lockdowns and social restrictions highlighted the issue of isolation, it was not new to people with health limitations. Isolation and disconnection, stemming from a variety of intersecting issues, (lack of accessible / suitable housing, transport, social and leisure activities, information and technologies, and exclusionary systems) all existed prior to the pandemic.

As I drove between homes in a locked-down city I considered connections; the therapeutic connection with a patient, my role in connecting people to the city, as well as wider connections between the city and health.  Initially I had been reluctant to include myself in the writing, but I soon realised the necessity for transparency about my professional perspective.

I came to visualise a series of poems from my viewpoint that would connect the ‘rooms’ around the city, while creating clarity and a cohesion between the poems within the book. In doing so I started to consider the subject of therapeutic use of self and patient rapport. While this is not something I remember formally studying on my university qualification course, it was learned on the job, from patients and peers, through error and self-reflection.

Hagedorn (2000) argues that ‘the therapeutic use of self is the most important of the core processes of Occupational Therapy’. In general practice, a similar concept is the use of relational healthcare, ‘a high-quality relationship that has been shown to improve patient outcomes’. (RCGP, 2021) As I have become older, and more confident in my role, I have come to reflect more on my therapeutic use of self and its importance; the writing process became another way of doing this.

Reflective Practice

The intersection of my creative practice and professional practice became a generative space for reflection. In the end, this reflection on my professional role became an integral part of the book. NHS Scotland and the Royal College of Occupational Therapists (RCOT) both recommend reflective practice as part of continuing professional development.  The Health and Care Professions Council defines reflection as:

In my professional experience, reflective practice is more often carried out informally, talking through challenging situations and cases with colleagues and peers, reflecting on actions taken and possible alternative paths. The act of writing Glasgoscopy was a personal reflection on not only the patients I visit and my professional practice but the wider context of the city and its effects on people’s health.

Reflective practice theory highlights how the creation of critical distance by stepping outside of ourselves helps us better understand complex situations. The process of writing a book, with its physical and temporal distance from events, its personal reflections being at a distance from the professional self, and the geographical distance of writing in my home on the other side of the city to the one I work in, provided this necessary critical distance. I write in more detail about space, place, scale and distance in Glasgoscopy in an article for Scottish Geographical Journal (Husband, 2026).

The forms of the poems and the conventions of a book of poetry became ways of framing, understanding, and making sense of these work experiences. In community work, we witness many situations that fall outside our scope of practice, issues that cannot be solved, effected or influenced. We can only react to them (the situations) and relate to them (the patients, and those around them) as human beings. The writing also became a subconscious processing of the human emotions behind the professional demeanour.

Although I am calling this a form of reflective practice it lacks the shared learning that comes with reflecting with colleagues. It should be highlighted that this was a personal choice and one that I carried out entirely in my own time. Only after Glasgoscopy was published and about to launch, did I realise my anxiety about its reception by my colleagues. After the launch event, I was relieved to hear that my colleagues felt it captured the community working role very well.

I was equally pleased to read a review of the book by someone I had no connection to. NHS psychotherapist Khadija Rouf wrote:

Similarly, I was keen for others who may be patients, carers or family members to find that the book resonated with them. Informal feedback at public readings has been positive. On this note, one of the last poems I wrote for the book, ‘Waiting room’, is an attempt to remind myself/ourselves that we are all patients at some point in our lives.

The creative act of writing Glasgoscopy has enabled me to reflect on my professional practice in community healthcare from a critical distance. The result has been a revisiting of core professional theories and values, an increased professional self-awareness, and a consideration of the wider issues affecting health within a city. The process has been beneficial for my professional practice in terms of reaffirming the values that are important to me in my role. Crucially it has also been a personal reflection on the human experience which I hope I have managed to communicate through the poetry.

About the author

Vicki Husband has read her poetry at events from international poetry festivals to local radio and local libraries, as well taken part in translation projects and created work for visual-poetry exhibitions. Meanwhile Vicki has worked as an OT for the NHS for over 25 years.

References

Hagedorn (2000) quoted in Currid & Pennington (2010) Continuing Professional Development: Therapeutic use of self, June 2010, British Journal of Wellbeing, 1(3):35-42

Health and Care Professions Council. (2021) https://www.hcpc-uk.org/standards/meeting-our-standards/reflective-practice/what-is-reflection/

Husband, V. (2026) Glasgoscopy: Writing around a city, its citizens, its health. Scottish Geographical Journal, 09/03/2026

McDougall, Dr. G. (ed.) (2023) The prescription, The Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons Glasgow

Rouf, K. (2026) ‘Gesticulating in blue’, The Friday Poem, Substack, 06/02/2026

Royal College of General Practitioners. (2021). The power of relationships: what is relationship-based care and why is it important? General Practice and Covid recovery. . https://www.rcgp.org.uk/getmedia/ca3e21e7-f742-47d7-9538-77e59bbb1ec7/power-of-relationships-rcgp-2021.pdf

Book jacket images credited to Mark Meechan at Red Axe Design.