The registered charity's aim is to show gratitude to health service staff for their care and to promote poetry. The patient may keep the free poetry card as an enduring rather than ephemeral contact with the poetry. Over half a million poetry cards have been made freely available to NHS patients and staff to date. PitWR has become the most extensive arts in health programme in the NHS, and the most widely read regular national poetry publication. PitWR was established in 1995, and has published quarterly in its current format since autumn 1998.

PitWR has concentrated from the start on service to NHS Primary Care surgeries and health centres. This usually neglected sector provides particular advantage for all art in health projects. First, the individual units are small scale. There is therefore a direct involvement of practice staff in the activity. The enthusiasm of staff in promoting the poetry cards to their patients is a key to success. Next, general practice deals with the public as part of their daily routine, and who are not in some way isolated by their morbidity. Benefits flow directly into the community. Further, general practice is diffused in every community sector and so penetrates hard pressed problems areas that art activities rarely touch. PitWR has achieved a strong appeal across a wide spectrum of social and economic diversity. The poetry pamphlets are taken away by patients in the high-rise concrete wilderness as in the leafy suburb. PitWR reaches parts other arts cannot touch.

The original idea in 1998 was to serve locally some thirty surgeries in South West London. But soon demand grew, fuelled mostly by word of mouth. The number of surgeries served had risen to over 450 by 2002. To meet demand, distribution was extended nation-wide. A major expansion programme was launched 2003. The number of waiting rooms served grew from some 300 to some 1200 by the end of 2004. The Winter 2005 Edition was sent to some 1400 waiting rooms, distributing some 40,000 free poetry cards throughout Britain and Ireland.

But in spring 2006, funding problems forced PitWR to cut one thousand waiting rooms from its service. The distribution for the winter 2006 edition was reduced to some 500.

Happily, with growing support from charitable trusts and independent private sponsors, the distribution list has steadily been restored. The circulation for the summer 2008 edition is over 1000 NHS waiting rooms with a distribution of over 22000 poetry cards.

To secure the future, the trustees of PitWR consider that independent funding is essential for this arts in health charity. The project is sponsored by Lee Donaldson Associates Ltd, the founding editor's private Company of economic and environment consultants. On PitWR's registration as a charity, the Company established The Beatrice Trust, with the family of the editor as trustees, to manage gift aid.  To ensure PitWR's future, The Beatrice Trust has guaranteed a core funding grant  annually for until 2010

The Carlisle based The Emerton Christie Charitable Trust made a unsolicited grant in January 2006 and doubled this sum subsequently. The funds have been devoted to restoring and expanding PitWR in the Carlisle and the Newcastle localities.

In spring 2008, The Tanner Trust, founded to commemorate the British industrialist Basil Tanner made a substantial donation. This grant led to restoration supply to NHS surgeries in Cornwall, Oxford, Bucks, Sussex, Essex and the Merseyside, areas of special interest to the Tanner Trust.

To complement private trust funds a PitWR Friends scheme was launched with the spring 2008 edition. The initial response is very encouraging and a slow but steady growth is envisaged over the coming years.

PitWR is popular and well received across a wide range of social diversity. For this reason, there is no fixed Friends subscription, since all are welcome. Some poems are long and some are short, but all are important. It is the same with donations the suggested range is Epic (One hundred pounds or more): Ode (Seventy-five pounds): Ballad (Fifty pounds); Sestina (Twenty-five pounds): Sonnet (Fifteen pounds)!

PitWR Friends together with grants from private charitable trusts in the  present climate for art support is the preferred funding model which can preserve an independent editorial approach appropriate for an arts in health literary charity. 

A local Cambridge and Peterborough charity Arts and Minds sponsored a special edition of PitWR with the spring 2008 edition. The sponsorship enabled PitWR to restore circulation to NHS surgeries in the area.