Confined to the Sidelines is a juxtaposition of the poems Jeff Nisker wrote in the time of COVID with four of his related social-justice poems. With this volume, Nisker hopes to imbue new compassion in health professionals, other health-policy makers and the general public, who all are or will be immersed in COVID's resulting diminishment of our health and social systems. COVID altered Nisker's life before he ever heard the word COVID, when he developed pneumonia from COVID in February 2020, two weeks before the world learned that a "virus of concern" had been rampant in Wuhan Province in China since Autumn 2019.

Confined to the Sidelines is the only book in which Nisker's poems have remained as poems. His other creative writings have begun as poems, but have morphed into plays for wider engagement. Indeed several of his plays are but compilations of long prose poems, interwoven into a theatre format. Nisker decided the collection of poems in Confined to the Sidelines should remain poems because the concision of poetry is important in healthcare education due to the limited curricular minutes. Within these limits, poetry's precision can simultaneously unpack a topic and imbue compassion through a tightly-focused social-justice lens.

Jeff Nisker is a clinician, researcher, university professor, and writer. His plays and short stories bring the general public, health professionals, and policy makers to the position of persons immersed in the social inequities of new scientific capacities. Jeff has received many research grants in the basic, clinical, and social sciences to study prevention of estrogen-related cancer, ethical and social issues in reproductive genetics, and the lack of accommodation that persons with disabilities receive for health promotion. Jeff has also co-held a Canadian Institutes of Health Research/Health Canada grant to research public engagement and citizen deliberation for health policy development through his innovative use of full-length theatre. Jeff has authored or co-authored over 170 peer-reviewed scientific articles and book chapters, many short stories, and seven plays published in the collection From Calcedonies to Orchids: Plays Promoting Humanity in Health Policy. His plays have been performed throughout Canada, in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and South Africa. Jeff has served on the editorial boards of Journal of Medical Humanities and ARS Medica and is the international representative on the Board of the Centre for Literature and Medicine. Jeff has served national positions such as Co-chair of Health Canada’s Advisory Committee on Reproductive and Genetic Technologies; Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology Canada; Scientific Officer of the CIHR Peer Review Committee on Health Ethics, Law and Humanities; and Executive of the Canadian Bioethics Society. Jeff has received many research and education awards, including the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada President’s Award for the most significant contribution to the specialty; Western University’s Faculty Scholar’s Award for Innovation in Research and Education; and, for his plays promoting public engagement in health policy, Canada’s Royal Conservatory of Music’s Music Excellence in Education Award, which recognizes the efforts of an outstanding educator who embraces the idea that the arts have a capacity to change the world. He was one of the first two obstetrician-gynaecologists inducted into the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences. Through all this, Jeff has maintained his clinical practice in hormone-dependent malignancy, pituitary tumours, and reproductive endocrinology.

Jeff Nisker's profile page