Sharing musical experiences to support care
Steven Lyons is a HCPC registered Music Therapist and Post-Doctoral Dementia Research Fellow with the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration (ARC) North East and North Cumbria. In this blog, he discusses how music can help to improve care for those living with dementia.
As an Allied Health Professional, my role as a Music Therapist involves working in health and social care settings to collaborate with patients, carers and other health professionals to help develop services to address unmet needs.
I work in care homes with older people who have a broad and complex range of health needs including dementia and memory problems. In these setting it is important to have access to activities that can support a person’s needs, interest or management of a condition in a personalised way.
Music is accessible to people at all stages of dementia, can have positive effects on cognition, and a number of research studies have also shown that music therapy can be a useful non-pharmacological intervention for alleviating symptoms of dementia, such as depression, anxiety and agitation.
However, although public awareness about the benefits of music for people living with dementia is growing, many carers and family members are still unsure why or how music might be beneficial.
Through my Dementia Fellowship, I am exploring how musical experiences can foster experiences of connection for people living with advanced dementia and their carers, as well as exploring the enablers and barriers to implementing music in care.
My experience in care homes has given me opportunities to work alongside carers and learn about the challenges they face particularly when working with residents who may no longer be able to express their own needs and preferences.
Many carers I speak to mention the need for more specialist support in the later stages of dementia when residents may start to withdraw from social activities and become increasingly isolated.
Music therapy can be an effective intervention for people who have difficulty communicating verbally. I am interested to explore whether offering carers an opportunity to collaborate as partners in music therapy sessions may help maximise the benefit to the person living with advanced dementia.
Our DEM-COMM community of practice has presented an amazing opportunity to engage with and learn from other practitioners and academics who have really developed my thinking around how to do applied dementia research.
As part of my fellowship, I have had the opportunity of joining Special Interest Groups in care homes and home care, which has supported my awareness around the opportunities and challenges of conducting research in these settings. The people I have met through these networks have been a great source of inspiration as we all share similar aims of finding practical ways to improve quality of life for people living with dementia and their carers.
For more information about this project please contact: steven.lyons@newcastle.ac.uk