News & Blog
We are delighted to have our work featured in Brighton and Hove County Council’s ‘The Art of Good Health’ report. The report highlights the positive impact that being involved in the arts can have on health and wellbeing from cradle to grave. The report demonstrates that the arts can be delivered in almost any setting, including hospitals.
The report features our work at the Royal Alexandra Children’s Hospital. Our trained music leaders go onto the wards three times a week, bringing acoustic instruments and music technology right to children’s bedsides. The interactions provide vital stimulation to help them develop, distracts from uncomfortable procedures, and creates a sense of community between children, families, and hospital staff. You can read our case study in the report here.
We are delighted to announce the release of a short film by the Sussex Community NHS Foundation Trust showing our Wishing Well programmes work with older people living with dementia in Community Hospitals. We use music to build a bridge across the isolation caused by dementia, helping people to connect with the people around them again.
Lead Nurse Lucy Frost told us that, ”It brings the patients and staff and visitors all together, and it helps us also known a little bit about the patient, because to every point in somebody’s life, they often have a song about it.”
Wishing Well brings live music-making interactions right to people’s bedsides and to communal spaces to help relieve the anxiety and isolation that they can experience. Soundtracks we accumulate throughout our lives are vividly retained in the memories of people even in the late stages of dementia. We tap into these soundtracks to reduce some of the anxiety they experience.
”It changed the whole environment of our hospital. The staff are more motivated to try different things with the patients, they have introduced games, and the patients find it fun and when you are reflecting fun, than you get fun back, it creates a really good atmosphere.” Nurse reflects on the effect that music has on the hospital.
Our work is only made possible by our generous supporters please click donate and help us continue to bring music to people!
We’re over the moon to announce that our work with The Royal Alexandra Children’s Hospital in Brighton has been shortlisted for a highly prestigious HSJ Award! Through our Wishing Well programme, we’ve been making music with children and families in critical care at The Alex since 2013 and now, “Wishing Well at The Alex” is shortlisted in the “compassionate care” category. Partnership working is at the heart of our project’s success and enables to work with the poorliest children and their families and make a difference to their time in hospital. When we make music together, the hospital ward becomes a place where ideas are flowing, people are expressing themselves and showing what they can do …amid all the loss and trauma of long hospital stays, creating this bubble of safety can make a huge difference.
Reflecting on the news, Children’s Critical Care Practitioner Janet Lee said that,
“It is our job to make sure that we enrich the lives of the children and families that we look after in as many ways as possible whilst they are in our care – music is one of the ways that we can do that”.
For more information on the national HSJ Awards, please visit: https://awards.hsj.co.uk/
We are celebrating a grant of £39,726 from Arts Council England to support our work with older people living with dementia in acute hospital settings!
The funding will support Rhythmix’s Wishing Well Music in Healthcare programme which brings live music making to the bedsides of people living with dementia while they are in hospital.
This new programme will enable our team, of Musicians in Healthcare, to bring their vocal, instrumental and technology skills right to the heart of healthcare. Making music with people at their bedsides helps to shine a light on people’s talents, creativity and life stories; it celebrates what people living with dementia can do and helps support wellbeing during the challenges of hospitalisation.
The Wishing Well Musicians in Healthcare are a team, dedicated to bringing creative experiences into hospital settings where music can have a profound impact on wellbeing – get a glimpse of their work in our short films here
Commenting on the grant Jane Humberstone, Vice Chair at Rhythmix, said:
‘’Wishing Well is one of the deepest experiences I have had when observing the impact of music on the brain. Music is part of our everyday life and we all know it is good for us. Many of us are lucky enough to have a life transformed by it. However, to have confirmed that it continues to have such positive effects even into late dementia truly uplifting. I cannot think of a better cause. Thank you to Arts Council England for their continued support for this work.’’
Our team of “Wishing Well” musicians bring music-making right to the bedsides of children and young people in hospital, helping to create positive experiences at a really difficult time for families.
Making music together provides a way of expressing and releasing stress; a moment of fun that has nothing to do with illness or the frightening things that hospitalisation can involve. It’s a very normal thing in fact; playing musical games or singing lullabies with your baby but in the extraordinary world of the hospital, music-making takes on many extra layers of significance.
One of the many challenges for children who are in hospital for long periods of time is that most of the adults they meet are medical professionals who need to carry out uncomfortable, sometimes stressful procedures and interventions. The youngest child will quickly associate “someone is coming into my room” with “something uncomfortable is going to happen” It can put children in a state of stress. Having musicians on hospital wards, as part of the multi-disciplinary team that supports children, can work towards redressing this balance by creating fun, safe, child focused interactions that ask “what can you do?” rather than “what is wrong with you?
One of our Musician’s writes:
“We gently played music by the door to a little boy’s room. A passing Doctor commented “he’ll cry if you go in!” but Mum caught our eye and waved to us. We very gently approached the little boy, crouched down near to him and started singing nursery rhymes, looking for a response to show us which one he liked. He was withdrawn at first, suspicious of what we might do but the introduction of our brightly coloured percussion was too much for him to resist. As he explored the sounds of the different instruments, Mum suggested his favourite lullaby and for a while, we all sat, singing and playing together, all anxiety forgotten and the rest of the hospital, a million miles away.”