Eilidh’s Story

The biggest motivation for keeping them going is they work, bottom line. I’ve seen people come in here with no ability to communicate; their dementia has progressed to the extent that their family have no real meaningful contact with them. We concentrate 1:1 sessions with them to start with and then by the time they have a few months of that, they’ve completely turned around. They’ve started responding to people again, they’re beginning to respond when we speak, they understand what we’re saying and more importantly, their families have been able to get a little bit of them back and join in something. That makes a massive difference to these folk and there’s very little out there to offer that to people with advanced dementia. Let’s remember this is not about getting together and having a sing-song; this is about forging a communication between you and the person you’re looking after that enables them to get out of that locked-in state, and enables them to communicate with everyone around them.

Doing it in a group, everyone comes together; it’s communal, you share emotional bonding with the other people that are in the group. But the biggest difference for a lot of people is when you target that one on one, when you take somebody who’s distressed and you find a way to unlock that. You know, you can target when someone’s getting washed and dressed and have their favourite music on. So it might not necessarily be a drum or something – we’ve had music boxes for people before that’ll play ‘Blue Danube’ or, you know, stuff from their childhood that evokes a warmth to them. We’ve got Alexa set up through the whole home that have people’s playlists on them so that if they’re having a bad day, they can have whatever they prefer on. A 10-minute session with somebody can make the difference between a brilliant day and an awful day, so it’s a really good technique to just get folk to open up.

The biggest one for us is the ocean drum – everybody loves it! The kids that come in to visit love it, the staff love it – they nick it regularly! The residents – the sound of it is just so natural and soothing, almost umbilical, it’s that kind of feeling of safety. They love things that they can pick up; I’ve had people that couldn’t hold cutlery starting out with the wee bells and chimes and 3 or 4 months later, they’re actually eating themselves again because they’re getting that stimulation with their hands and that tactile movement is triggering something. The windchimes – they’re amazing, we all play with them. At one point we had them tied to all the banisters in the corridors upstairs and people just put their hands through as they walked along. Xylophones work too. The thing is, you can turn lots of things into musical instruments once you actually put your mind to it and it’s not about what you hear, it’s about what you feel. Music is about the emotions that you feel, it’s about expressing yourself, it’s about touch, it’s about texture, just as much as it is about the actual noises that you’re making; there’s just so much more to it.

I do it because it works. I do it because I’ve seen it work and the biggest achievement for me isn’t necessarily the way that I’ve seen it work for the residents. Music has empowered my staff, it has taken girls who potentially weren’t as confident in themselves as they could be and has proven to them that actually they’ve got far more to offer than they thought they had. It’s given them a skill that’s transferrable to other areas in their life and whilst it’s brilliant the work that it does with the residents, and I would never stop it because it’s so beneficial to the residents, when you see a member of the care staff learning how to do this and coming out of their own shell and the confidence they’ve developed out of it, it’s worth it just for that, it really is. I’ve seen relatives who’ve been totally cut off from their loved ones for a long time because of whatever illness that person has, being able to reconnect with their loved one in a way that we couldn’t give to them any other way. There just isn’t any other way to connect them as closely as this does. It’s something anybody can join in, but you have to invest in training the girls to do it; this has to be a whole home approach.