Crossing boundaries between arts and health

Video Transcript:

Cliff Wilson:

Hi. I'm Cliff Wilson. I'm a commissioning manager, and I work in Oldham on the mental health team, and most of my work is around dementia and learning disabilities. What attracted me to Music in Mind was that we know that music therapy is something that works really well with people with dementia and people get a lot of benefit from it. We wanted to sort of integrate that into our dementia services that we have in Oldham. We have care homes and we have community services, and this feels like it would fit the bill really well.

We also want to extend support to carers as well, and we felt that from the feedback that we had, Music in Mind would provide a really good service and would fit in and compliment the other services that we have in Oldham. We do have a dementia strategy, and part of that was just to sort of develop services within Oldham to make sure that they've reached as many people as possible.

We wanted to have improved services in care homes as well as in the community, and Music in Mind is helping us reach some of those targets to make people have more services, which is meaningful, and also supports them in making friends and having peer support. Long-term, we see Music in Mind fitting into and complimenting the services that we already have. I would like to see that when somebody receives a dementia diagnosis, that they're given information about local community groups where they can link into to get music therapy. Also as well, when people go into respite care or long-term residential care, to be able to receive music therapy, which helps them and also helps people who care for them as well.