- Stories from junior doctors in training
- Stories from the Saskatoon Health Region
- Arthur & Co.: Stories about living with Arthritis
- Society of the Holy Child Jesus
- Healing journeys
- Work in Progress
- Caring for vulnerable babies: the reorganisation of neonatal services in England
- Interpreting Tales
- Having a stroke: being a parent
- Stories from Connecting for Health
- Stories from the RCN quality improvement programme
- Carers' Resource, Harrogate, Craven and Airedale
- Stories from the RCN PDF programme
- Reconnecting with life: stories of life after stroke
- Stories from Pilgrim Projects
- Stories from the Working in Partnership Programme (WiPP)
- Stories from NHS Tayside
- Stories from NEYNL
- Stories from the Heart Improvement Programme
- Charles Bruce's stories
- Grace and Joe Desa's stories
- Alison Ryan's stories
- David Clark's stories
- Emma Allen's stories
- Monica Clarke's stories
- Ian Kramer's stories
The Patient Voices digital stories
The Patient Voices digital stories use video, audio, still images and music to convey patients', carers', practitioners' and managers' own stories in a unique way. They are intended to touch the hearts of managers, clinicians and others striving to improve the quality of health and social care.
Distribution of these stories is funded solely by Pilgrim Projects as a social enterprise. Please let us know how and when you use the stories, so that we can use your experiences to persuade sponsors to support the development of more stories for everyone to use.
The stories
Most stories are gathered during a one-day small-group workshop session with story-tellers, who may be patients, carers, managers and/or healthcare professionals. The stories are accessible from the links at the left of this page. The stories have been coded at a bandwidth suitable for easier viewing across the Internet, but a broadband connection is still advisable due to their size. Contact us if you would like to obtain higher resolution files. If you would like to be notified of developments to the programme or website, or when we release new stories, please join the Patient Voices discussion group using the link on the 'Contact us' page.
Using the stories
The patients, carers and professionals who contributed their stories to the Patient Voices programme have consented to their use as an educational and learning resource as part of the international drive to improve the quality and responsiveness of services for patients and carers. Any other use or modification or editing of the stories without prior written agreement is not acceptable.
In order to make this possible, the Patient Voices digital stories on this website are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
Linking to the stories
If you would like to link to the stories from your website, that would be fine but, rather than link direct to
individual stories, it would be best if you could
provide links to the page on which the desired story sits on our website,
with an instruction along the lines of:
"View the digital story entitled 'Surviving' on the following web page: www.patientvoices.org.uk/pilgrim.htm".
This is for several reasons.
We have no funding for the hosting or developing the website, and so it's
all done at our cost and in our spare time.
The pages are currently all static.
If a story is ever updated (as we had to do when our postcode was changed by
the Royal Mail for example...) then the file name changes to identify it as
different. So, linking direct to movie files may break.
We would also like to encourage users to see the site, rather than just one
or two stories, so linking to the page a story is on allows viewer to see
what we do, and what else is available, so that they can explore and learn
independently, as well as in a directed manner.
Please let us know which pages you are linking to, then we can make a note and try our best not to move or break them, but we can make no guarantees that a page will remain present.
Playing the stories
The movies on the website are Windows Media Video (.wmv) files. To play them you will need Microsoft Windows Media Player. This comes with most recent versions of Windows, but if you have an older version of Windows, or need to reinstall Windows Media Player, you can download it from the Microsoft website
Playing the stories on Apple Macintoshes
If you are using an Apple Mac, and the files will not play, then you either need to install the Mac version of Microsoft Windows Media Player, or or install an appropriate codec so that Quicktime can play .wmv files. These are available from the Microsoft website
If you are running OS X then you have two options - either to add the wmv components that allow Quicktime to play wmv files, or to install Windows Media Player 9 for Mac OS X. If you are running a classic Mac (8.1 or later), then you have to download and install Windows Media Player 7.1 for Mac.
Playing the stories from within PowerPoint
The movies may be played from within a PowerPoint presentation, but embedding video in a PowerPoint presentation is a little more tricky than embedding a picture. We have written a short note on how to do this, which you can get here.
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Copyright 2008 Pilgrim Projects Limited. Last updated: 16/08/2008
Disclaimer and acceptable use policy
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