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90%
Shared Reading gives me space to put my day-to-day concerns to one side
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95%
Shared Reading lifts my mood
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97%
I look forward to this group as an important part of my week
Every week, The Reader brings people together at Shared Reading groups across the UK. Here, people connect, and share experiences using stories and poems. There is no pressure to talk or read aloud.
Through collaborations with hospitals, NHS trusts, GPs and clinical commissioning groups, Shared Reading helps people stay well in their community.
Shared Reading can be embedded in NHS services through staff training, enhancing the patient experience and developing the workforce to deliver creative activities with their service users.
Why Shared Reading?
At Shared Reading groups, a trained Reader Leader selects wonderful stories and poems to read aloud together. Everyone is welcome to share how the words make them feel, as well as their thoughts, ideas and memories. There is no pressure to talk or read aloud.
Everyone experiences what is read in their own way, but the shared language found in literature can help us to understand ourselves – and others – better.
Research, spanning over a decade, has shown that Shared Reading is an effective non-medical activity that improves well-being, reduces social isolation and builds connection. Findings include:
- Shared Reading can be offered as alternative activity, follow-up or adjunct to Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) for people with mental health issues. Read the research here.
- Shared Reading provides a significant improvement in quality of life for people living with dementia. Read the research here.
- Shared Reading helps in the alleviation of symptoms for people experiencing chronic pain. Read the research here.
- Shared Reading groups in prisons directly impacted members’ wellbeing, improving feelings of hope, agency, self-efficacy, interpersonal trust, relationships with staff and motivation to change. Read more about our work in Criminal Justice settings here.
Health Services
Since 2011, The Reader has been embedding Shared Reading as a part of inpatient and community care strategies for improving mental health and wellbeing for local people.
We currently work with NHS Trusts across the country to deliver groups on inpatient wards and community settings.
Shared Reading can offer a non-medicalised form of prevention and intervention, for those living with low-level wellbeing to those in acute mental distress, providing accessible, meaning-making activities across care pathways. Wherever they are, participants control their degree of involvement in a safe, social space where people feel valued and at home, accessing a language for complex, emotional experiences, with consistently profound results.
Care Homes
The Reader has worked with care homes since 2006. When we read with people living with memory loss, the model remains the same; we take things a little slower, but still see great results for people, even those at an advanced stage of their diagnosis. We’re promoting personalised care for people living with memory loss, by offering new, vibrant and meaningful activities that demonstrably improve wellbeing and carve a safe, calming and stimulating space for people to connect to themselves and those around them. Care home staff have reported that residents appear less agitated, contribute in new ways and even sleep better when groups have taken place.
Our Research
Ready and Waiting: What the voluntary sector can do for social prescribing in South Liverpool
Social prescribing is a key component of the NHS Long Term Plan. It aims to help people to have greater control over their own health and wellbeing by connecting them to social activities in their communities, such as Shared Reading, volunteering, gardening and many others, that deliver measurable health outcomes. In the Liverpool City Region, VCSEs (Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprises) play a vital role in delivering these activities.
In 2019, The Reader – working alongside partners LCVS, Capacity and PSS – led a collaborative project that brought VCSEs, local Primary Care Networks and communities in South Liverpool together to explore and test the barriers preventing patients from making the most of the VCSE social prescribing support and services already on offer in South Liverpool.
The insights and information gathered throughout the 12-month project are captured in this report which was published in autumn 2020.
An Investigation into the Therapeutic Benefits of Reading in Relation to Depression and Wellbeing
This research partnership between The Centre for Research Into Reading, Literature and Society (CRILS) at The University of Liverpool, Liverpool Primary Care Trust and The Reader looked at two Shared Reading groups over a 12-month period. The participants had all been diagnosed with depression and the clinical data indicated that there were statistically significant improvements in their mental health during the period.
Includes 11 case studies alongside personal feedback from group leaders on their own key moments and findings from their reading in care homes, this provides an inspiring introduction to reading with older people, whatever their situation.
A Comparative Study of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and Shared Reading for Chronic Pain – 2016
This report provides moving analyses of what shared reading can do for people when their lives have been dramatically altered due to illness, loss and depression. It also explores in further detail the idea that shared reading might be therapeutic without being a therapy.
Reader Stories
Meet some of the people who are part of our Shared Reading community and hear their stories
Helen’s Reader Story – “I owe my life to that group and Shared Reading.”
I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and…
Waldo’s Reader Story – “There’s a shared connection”
Waldo is a Peer Recovery Trainer in Camden. He talks about how Shared Reading helped him when he was struggling…
Sally’s Reader Story – “It was as if the poetry unlocked a part of her that dementia was keeping hidden away”
This Dementia Action Week, Sally, an Occupational Therapy Assistant tells us how Shared Reading has benefited patients she works with…
