Music as a gift for life? Using music in dementia care

The objectives of the study were to better understand how the responses of people with dementia towards a series of musical activities were understood and interpreted by their care givers. The research explored the extent to which caregiver observations could serve as a proxy language for those with limited memory and verbal capacity. 33 care staff and trained volunteers based in five full time care facilities in UK and Japan carried out a series of open observations on pre-selected residents with mid – to final-stage dementia, during a series of informal musical experiences. Subsequently, interviews were held with each of the participants in order to better understand what they had observed and how
they had interpreted the responses which residents had made during the event.

Our results suggested that informal musical experiences can potentially offer a range of benefits to care staff, alongside those experienced by residents, and the act of carrying out the observations increased the level of observational skills and the confidence which care givers have in making assessments about the relative levels of well-being in individual residents. The study concluded that in addition to being a pleasant interlude, or a simple form of entertainment, musical experiences can actually become an important and sensitive tool for assessing physical and cognitive health, along with providing a unique context in which disability and stigma are removed.