CIMTR public lecture webinar: Evaluating singing groups for people with dementia and their carers: Findings from the PRESIDE 2024 study with Dr Becky Dowson

Abstract

The number of people living with dementia in the UK is estimated to be around 900,000, and most of these people live in the community. There is a shortage of effective therapeutic interventions to support people with dementia and their family carers.

Singing is popular, accessible to most people and relatively inexpensive to deliver at scale.  The logic of its effect is that the social, emotional and physiological stimulation of regular group singing helps to maintain mental functioning and community inclusion for the person with dementia. An enjoyable shared experience may strengthen the caring relationship. 

Although there is a growing evidence base for music and dementia, there is a lack of large, randomised studies of community-based interventions. PRESIDE 2024 was a randomised controlled feasibility study with a waiting-list design which aimed to demonstrate that it is feasible to conduct this kind of research by seeing whether it was possible to recruit enough people to take part in the study and retain them for the study duration.

We also wanted to see whether the methods we used (such as asking the control group to wait before attending sessions) were acceptable to the participants. A further aim was to understand whether the groups had benefits for the participants and how they experienced them through collecting qualitative and quantitative data.

This lecture will present the findings from the PRESIDE study, thinking about what we can learn from them and what are the next steps for research in this area. It will explore some of the challenges which we encountered conducting this study, particularly with regard to recruitment and research in a post-COVID context.

Speaker

Becky Dowson is a Music Therapist and researcher with a particular interest in music-based interventions in dementia care. She qualified in Music Therapy at Anglia Ruskin University in 2012 and gained her PhD from the University of Nottingham in 2020.

From 2019 to 2024 she was a Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham, and latterly was co-Principal Investigator for the PRESIDE 2024 study of singing groups for people with dementia.

She is currently a Postgraduate Research Fellow at the Cambridge Institute for Music Therapy Research and on the editorial board of the British Journal of Music Therapy. She works in clinical practice for Chiltern Music Therapy.