We spend eons of our lives in medical waiting rooms and what - asks Rogan Wolf - do we get? "An overworked receptionist and a few nasty notices on the walls."

Or, as the poet Jackie Kay puts it, we have to hang around in "these fallow rooms of spider plants/ and magazines, where the telephone shrills/ for someone else, and the outside world/ is a distant drone, and time itself is out on call".

So now 400,000 poetry posters are to be sent to hospitals, GP surgeries, dentists, health centres and mental health offices all over the country in a campaign to make their public areas more human.

The project - the biggest of its kind - sets out to extend the worldwide success of Poems on the Underground and Poems on the Buses in London to a different, clinical domain.

It was launched yesterday by the poet laureate, Andrew Motion, with readings in Mayday hospital, Croydon. His new poem While I Wait for You features on one poster, as do works by Carol Anne Duffy, Dannie Abse, Roger McGough, Maya Angelou, Derek Walcott and 45 other contemporaries commissioned by the poet David Hart.

Also included in the packs planned for 4,000 waiting rooms are favourite verses by Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Blake. Some poems are in Gaelic, Urdu, Hindi and other tongues, with English translations. Motion called it "an inspired scheme which combines two of poetry's sacred powers: to be entertaining and salubrious".

After a long search, the organisers found a poem which stands a chance of sending patients in to greet their dentist with a smile. It is an anonymous limerick which contrives to find a suitable rhyme for a dentist called Archibald Moss.

The £30,000 project is to be funded by the NHS and the Arts Council. A trial, with money from the King's Fund, the Poetry Society and London boroughs, has already been greeted with enthusiasm. An Oxford GP wrote of wanting "to unmedicalise the waiting room. The idea is to show we are human beings".

Yesterday Rogan Wolf, an independent social worker who pioneered the use of poems through the charity Hyphen-21, said medical waiting rooms were places of boredom as well as anxiety, crisis and pain.

"People live their lives today in an entire rush. Waiting rooms are places where they open up and ask questions. What we give them at the moment dehumanises them as individuals. It does not support their inner selves. So here - in a poem - is straight talk, a window for the imagination and a touch of love."

These won't hurt a bit...

Please Take a Seat
List all the words you can for "wonderful"
and remember you are all of these.
Now imagine you're invisible
until you've counted up to five in Urdu:
eik, doh, tin, char, panj.
You will be seen shortly.

by Judy Tweddle

Waiting
I imagine a whole year like this
a whole year of waiting...
actually
you spend most of your time
sitting &
one third of your life in bed
you only get one call
better be ready

by Wendy Mulford

A Dentist

A dentist named Archibald Moss
Fell in love with the dainty Miss Ross.
Since he held in abhorrence
Her Christian name, Florence,
He renamed her his dear dental Floss.

by anonymous