Rachel’s Blog

I’m just home from a residential care home, having led a short ‘taster’ session. It was seriously challenging as well as being enjoyable too.

It is a fairly large residential care home, with a fantastic ethos – the activities co-ordinator frequently takes some of the residents to the pub! As with larger numbers of people, there is bound to be a greater diversity of people in terms of their abilities/limitations. Having previously met some of the residents, I wasn’t quite prepared (in terms of variety of songs/resources) to cater for the different levels that I found there. Although the session went reasonably smoothly, and part of the reason for this taster session was to gauge people’s needs, I was disappointed that I had not been able to engage with every person, and draw them into what I hoped to be an enjoyable and uplifting musical experience.

Having said this, many participants did enjoy themselves. Some were singing along and using percussion instruments to beat (or shake) in time. I think a small change of mixing up the people of different abilities would help enormously, as it would enable the less able people to feel more involved.

Key Learning:

• Take in more material than you plan to use, including songs of varying complexity, from the very simple, to the more difficult.
• Develop songs or activities to assess people’s different levels.
• Underline the importance of a tailored music session and emphasise the point of a taster session
• Don’t be afraid to ask staff for small changes in the set-up. They want the sessions to be positive, as much as you do.
• Enjoy it! Even if you feel like you are struggling, keep going, keep being enthusiastic, don’t give up.

On the BBC Headroom site, there is a section all about alzheimer’s disease. It is from here you can watch again Terry Pratchett’s documentary ‘Living With Alzheimer’s'- but there are also a number of other short videas made by different people, ordinary people, about alzheimer’s in their lives. It’s really interesting that many of the people being interviewed actually have the disease (is diagnosis getting better/earlier?) as most of my work is with people in the later stages, and therefore they do not communicate a great deal, let alone about themselves or their condition.

There is a disturbing message from many of those with dementia that somehow they will become less themselves, lose their humanity, or as one woman put it become ‘just a shell’.

I don’t know how I feel about this. I see the pain caused watching a loved-one increasingly struggle with daily tasks, and experience non-recognition, or unpleasant, or even violent behaviour from that loved-one. However, Alzheimer’s should not result in the slipping away of someone’s humanity. Just as disability campaigners argued against a medical model of disability, it is absolutely crucial that communities ensure an individual’s sense of personhood. Speaking to a carer at a residential dementia home, she expressed how she felt she knew a resident, even when they were very late stage dementia. There is more to our personalities than what we think, do or say. It’s our humanity talking.