Enhancing Communication Between Dementia Care Staff and Their Residents

An arts-inspired intervention

Gill Windle, Katherine Algar-Skaife, Maria Caulfield, Luke Pickering-Jones, John Killick, Hannah Zeilig, and Victoria Tischler

The arts are increasingly recognised as important and beneficial activities for people living with dementia. However, there is little peer-reviewed published research exploring arts-based learning for dementia care staff. In response, this paper explores (a) how dementia care staff describe forms of communication in care settings, and (b) the impact on communication following four sessions of ‘Creative Conversations’, an arts-based intervention for skills development.

Fourteen care homes received the intervention, delivered as 4 × 2 hour sessions. The intervention uses a range of activities (e.g. poetry, film, music, art making). Twenty–eight care staff were opportunistically sampled (mean age = 42.29), and provided pre-post qualitative data, obtained through interviews. Transcripts were analysed thematically.

Source: Article Abstract