Living Well with Dementia through Music by Catherine Richards

Author:Catherine Richards
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
Published: 2020-01-21T00:00:00+00:00

The origins of the charity ‘Sing for Your Life’

Catherine: Can you start off by telling me a bit about the history and aims of your organisation, Sing for Your Life?

Stuart: Sing for Your Life was incubated from a research project at Canterbury Christchurch University in the Sidney de Haan Research Centre for Arts and Health around 2005, and at the time I was chairman of the SE Region for the National Federation of Music Societies so I had on my patch something like 550 orchestras, choirs and choral societies, and there were probably about 35,000 individual members. This was at a time when people were beginning (a) to wake up to the value of singing and (b) the Government was talking about mobilising the volunteer resource, and of course I represented a very large number of volunteers in the south east region. I’d heard about this research which was going on and I thought that choral society members would make a good research population. And that’s how I got in contact with the Sidney De Haan Research Centre. And, although it was only about 15 years ago, it was a very new concept, and I can well remember going to see somebody at what was then the Primary Care Trust (PCT), who were responsible for public health in those days, and a doctor saying to me, ‘No, we’re not giving you any money; we don’t give money to people to enjoy themselves.’ Anyway, things have changed, luckily. We started off with a pilot project in Folkestone, and we brought a group of older people together. There were people who were still living at home, and also we paid for taxis so that people could be brought in from care homes. We set up what we called a Silver Song Club, which met at the Salvation Army place in Folkestone, and proved to be very successful.

Stuart went on to describe a randomized controlled trial involving the Silver Song Clubs which was eventually written up and published (Coulton et al. 2015) in the British Journal of Psychiatry.

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