Here I am, back for a while by @sallymag1

Keeping us connected

My mother had dementia. In my book Where Memories Go: Why Dementia Changes Everything I describe how the songs she had gaily sung throughout her life began to play an ever bigger part in how we looked after her.

The songs she knew, and that her children also knew through lifelong immersion – everything from the Inkspots to the Sound of Music, the Hallelujah Chorus to the ‘Northern Lights of Old Aberdeen’ – gradually became not just an excuse for a party but a conscious device to keep us connected to her and her to herself.

Harmonies filled the room

When she was frightened in the bath, she could be calmed with ‘It’s a Lovely Day Tomorrow’. When she was downhearted and depressed, nothing produced a smile like ‘Ye cannae shove your granny off a bus’. Some of the trickiest toileting moments could be eased by a swift elision into ‘How do you solve a problem like Maria?’ When she lay frail and almost motionless in her final weeks, she could still whisper a husky correction to the words of some ragged ditty from her children.

Singing gave her the ability to produce words in the right order again, which made her feel exquisitely good. Singing allowed her harmonies to fill the room with pleasure for other people, which made her feel great. Singing seemed to bypass the damaged parts of her brain and made her feel, for those few moments and quite a while afterwards, herself again.

You thought you’d lost me

With the help of music I found that even when her dementia was advanced, my mother could still come back, as if to shout, ‘Here I am. You thought you had lost me, but here I am, back for a while’; that even in the darkest hollows at the end of the dementia road it was sometimes possible to switch on a light.

After she died in April 2012 I was haunted by the sense that we had been on to something with music and that others should know about it.

A puzzling question

But how would it work in families where music was not as naturally engrained as it had been in ours? How would it work in care homes, where visiting musicians often bring communal pleasure to a dreary afternoon but cannot possibly be on hand when a frightening bath is due or amid the bleak agitations of the night? How would it work in a hospital, where nurses are far too busy to go shoving anyone’s granny off a bus? How do you ever scale this idea up?

I puzzled over that question in the months after my mother’s death, until one day I heard about an American organisation that was advocating personal music on iPods for people with dementia. And I thought, Of course.  That’s how you scale it up, that’s how you give thousands of people access to the music that, if my mother and a growing number of Americans were anything to go by, is just waiting to make them feel better.

And that’s when I decided to start the charity Playlist for Life, to do the same in the UK.

Person-centred care in action

Take a look at our website http://www.playlistforlife.org.uk to see and read about the wonderful transformations we have seen since beginning our work – not just in people with dementia themselves but in the folk who love them and are thrilled to have a means of bringing that loved one back for a while, and in the hospital and care home staff who are happier in their work when they can make the people they are caring for happy. Personal music is the ultimate in person-centred care.

Have a look at the video on the home page about Harry and Margaret, the very first couple we worked with. I defy you not to be moved.

We are working with families and care homes up and down the UK now and, increasingly, with staff in the NHS. A majority of Scottish NHS boards have come to us for training to bring this intervention to their patients, and we recently trained an NHS Trust in England.

Here’s a message from the Queen’s Medical Centre at Nottingham NHS Trust, who’ve just started work with offering a playlist for life intervention to people with dementia in their acute wards.

“We had the privilege of using personalised music with our first patient last week. The gentleman was uncommunicative, made no eye contact and had been severely agitated for weeks. His family said he wasn’t really into music but they gave us the names of songs that they thought would bring back memories for him. When his daughter put the headphones on his ears and the music played, his family commented on how his face relaxed. The gentleman tapped his feet a couple of times and commented ‘nice music’.

“However, I don’t think we or his family could have predicted what happened next. Ten minutes after listening to the music, we approached him and asked him if he liked the music. He sat forward and made eye contact and had a short but coherent two-way conversation. His family said ‘that is the first two way conversation he has had in weeks’.

His wife said afterwards that when she watches him listening to the music that ‘he sometimes smiles as if he is remembering a time when we listened to the songs together’.

I’m delighted to hear that NHS Ayrshire and Arran is interested in using personalised music for people with dementia with the help of Playlist for Life, the charity I founded in 2013, and look forward to supporting the staff with training and further support.

This week’s blog was by @sallymag1 (Sally Magnusson), Broadcaster, writer, founder and Chair of Playlist for Life: www.playlistforlife.org.uk

Twitter: @PlaylistForLife