Play list for life -Personalized intervention #Dementia care links to web site and information

 My dear friends Sally Magnusson ,Andy Lowness Caledonian  University and their team have been setting up this project for some time I truly believe in the power of music and sang to my mum first thing each morning

 I hope you can take time to look at their project ,website and films 

Tommy 

Play List for Life -information and web site 

    Link to website          http://www.playlistforlife.org.uk/

  videos                    http://www.playlistforlife.org.uk/videos/

  Meet the Team       http://www.playlistforlife.org.uk/aboutus/meet-the-team/

We encourage the use of personally meaningful music on iPods in the care and treatment of people with dementia

Our core work is to encourage families and other caregivers to offer people with dementia a thoughtfully compiled and highly personal playlist, delivered on an mp3 media player device such as an iPod, of the music that has been meaningful to them during their life.  Through this website we offer guidance that can help individuals to get started.

The joy of this approach is that the benefits extend much further than one person. Family members, either looking after someone at home or visiting them in residential care, find that sharing this kind of music can help recover the closeness of a relationship and bring structure to what is often a long day or a difficult visit.

A charity based in New York, Music and Memory, has been successfully introducing this in nursing homes across the United States for several years.  Their website contains a wealth of useful information (www.musicandmemory.org).

There are thought to be two main reasons why this approach to dementia is so successful in enhancing awareness, improving the ability to think and restoring (to some degree) a sense of identity and independence:

1. If music is personal enough there is an effect on autobiographical memory.  At the very least it brings a sense of safeness and belonging and familiarity in a world that comes to feel increasingly alien to the person with dementia.
2.   Compiling a playlist of a person’s life requires you to get to know them better and sharing it with them – through listening together – makes conversation gloriously possible again, even if it remains one-way. Human interaction is what people with dementia desperately need and so frequently lack, often because those who love them become increasingly stumped at how to engage them. Sharing a playlist brings people together.  That in itself is a therapy for dementia.  For those in the healthcare sector this approach embodies all the principles of person-centred care.

We are collaborating on academic research

Playlist for Life is collaborating with Glasgow Caledonian University and other academic partners on a research proposal to measure the efficacy, constraints and economic advantages of offering personal music on iPods to people with dementia in different care settings.

The research should enable policy-makers to assess the suitability of this non-pharmacological intervention for roll-out across the UK as a post-diagnostic tool in the treatment of all forms of dementia, in keeping with Scotland’s National Dementia Strategy (2013 – 2016).

What Next?

Based on our own experience and that of our partners in north America, Playlist for Life is preparing a training programme to enable professional caregivers in a variety of settings to offer this intervention themselves.