Win a Free Session with Music Mirrors

Would you like a free training session from Music Mirrors founder Heather Edwards? Sponsored by UK Healthcare Chairs!! (t&c’s)

Music Mirrors is a simple practical addition to care plans: a series of audio biographical cues to remind you of who you are. Here is a link to the website: Music Mirrors

Sounds can bring back memories for any one of us...

Brrrrring Brrrrring… You can even set this on most phones as your ringtone. How many people feel nostalgic for the old-fashioned ringing sound? 

If you were to witness someone transported in time to a different era when visiting a museum, you might place their memory in a historical context. It might make sense to you.  To watch the transformation made by simply picking up a phone: talking quietly, nodding, and crying as they put the phone down. If you were to wait and hear as they relate how they used to love to talk to people, how the touch of the melamine phone, the minimal digit phone number, the motion of turning the dial, the sound of the old-fashioned ring tone and the lifting of the receiver brought them back. Back to a time when they might have been listening in on the line, to a time when the landline was a lifeline of communication between friends and family. Maybe to a specific phone call.  At this moment your heart might reach out to them, for that phone call is so real to that person, you can feel them experience this reality. For the individual it may have a particular biographical context, they might recall a specific phone call for example.  Making links to things that matter for individuals is the essence of Music Mirrors. 

Founder of Music Mirrors Heather Edwards found a key to help her father, and this inspired her to create Music Mirrors.

...But most conventional care plans lack these links. A personal key is often hard to find, but worth creating in advance or looking for, and can be transformative. Heather was fortunate to find a key to help unlock her own father’s memories when he suffered a stroke and subsequent dementia. She said:

“ The change began after I found and began reading from a notebook of stories he had written about his earlier life. Episodes of speech often followed or seemed in response to hearing these readings of his own words, and in his last two years the moments of communication clearly meant a great deal to him as well as to my mother and me.”

As a music teacher, she then began sharing music with dementia groups and set up  “Come Singing”. The idea of words and sounds in a combination that forms the basis of Music Mirrors came from that and from reading to her father.

Music Mirrors enhance person-centred care and decrease social isolation.

Music Mirrors can bring comfort to those with dementia and long-term illness and help their relatives when they pass on. They are not just a list of sounds and songs, but rather a mix of things that can be used to spark conversation both with the individual and with a group. Preparing a Music Mirror can be done at any stage in life, or it may grow with time. Preparing one earlier in life can really benefit someone who goes on to develop memory loss.To a person with memory loss or dementia it is really important that they feel secure in the present moment.

Biographical cues can help people living with dementia to remember, and also encourage them in day to day activities.

So often a person with dementia may not  actually understand what is required to complete routine daily tasks. A Music Mirror might help with this as will be shown in filmed case studies.

Dementia affects over 850,000 people in the UK.

850,000 people are estimated to suffer from dementia in the UK, this is steadily increasing, numbers are expected to double every 20 years and it is thought the figures could rise to over a million by 2050. There is an urgent need to find ways of helping people living with dementia.

Music Mirrors: use and research

In the UK, Music Mirrors are currently used in domiciliary care, residential homes, acute hospital settings, by allied health professionals and as support and advance care planning after a dementia diagnosis. NorseCare, Norfolk’s largest care-home group uses Music Mirrors, sometimes in conjunction with Amazon Alexa devices to bring comfort and interest to their residents. Befriending organisations, sheltered housing complexes, Women's Institute, libraries and arts organisations have requested training for community workers and volunteers. Awareness is growing of the potential as legacy work with younger patients in palliative care.

In September 2017 the Centre for Gerontology and Dynamics of Healthy Aging of the University of Zurich began a four-year intervention study devoted to making and using Music Mirrors within Swiss dementia care.

In April 2018 Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital NHS Trust undertook an audit of how Music Mirrors could be used on an acute ward.

If you would like to learn how Music Mirrors works, get in touch. Reply by January 30th with a brief description of how Music Mirrors might help your organisation. Spread the word and let people know about this wonderful work. What a great activity! Uk Healthcare Furniture will help bring Music Mirrors to one lucky group. 

Music Mirrors can be taught to a group including both carers and cared-for, saving on time and money. It is a great opportunity to train staff and support patients. The technique is taught free of charge and can then be shared and cascaded to others.

‘For family members, making a Music Mirror together is a way to support and sustain the relationship with a loved one’ (Heather Edwards).

Here is your chance to join the growing number of organisations using Music Mirrors!!!!

UK Healthcare Chairs are offering to pay all or part of the fare as relevant (* t&c’s apply) for one lucky group, to enable the founder Heather Edwards to come to your institution. *Email: office@ukhealthcarechairs.co.uk.

T&C’S provided it falls within their set budget, the winner will be the first name picked and will be announced on January 30th 2020.  We ask for a backlink to our website and a review of the visit with a picture or two. UK Healthcare Chairs bears no responsibility for any issues that might arise from this offer.