Researchers have long been fascinated with correlation between music and memory. As for dementia patients, music therapy has been found useful. Dr. Audrey Weymiller, associate professor of Nursing at the […]
Researchers have long been fascinated with correlation between music and memory. As for dementia patients, music therapy has been found useful. Dr. Audrey Weymiller, associate professor of Nursing at the University of Arkansas, asserts that personalized music has been shown to decrease anxiety, depression, and disruptive behaviors associated with dementia. Prior research supports the impact on patients: decreased disruptive behaviors associated with dementia, less use of antipsychotic medications (which is really good as these agents used for “chemical restraint” are associated with increased risk of death in older adults), improved quality of life, decreased anxiety and depression.
Dr. Weymiller makes it possible for nursing students at the University of Arkansas to have a hands-on experience treating dementia patients with this method. Setting out with the notion that service learning experience would impact both residents and nursing students, she designed her course “Foundations of Nursing Practice” (NURS 3424) as service learning by involving her students as volunteers to the Music and Memory organization. The Music and Memory is “a non-profit organization that brings personalized music into the lives of the elderly or inform through digital music technology, vastly improving quality of life” (musicandmemory.org).
She believed that the service learning experience would impact the students by effecting their previously held stereotypes about older adults (ageism) and would give the nursing students an opportunity to implement a nursing intervention and evaluate its effect. This is a rare opportunity because generally nursing students are in a clinical site for one or two days a week limiting their ability to fully learn the nursing process: assessment, diagnosis, plan, implementation, and evaluation.
For her class, Dr. Weymiller chose The Veterans Administration Home, the only Music and Memory certified long term care facility in northwestern Arkansas, as the site of the intervention. This spring 2018, eight nursing students were each assigned a resident on the dementia unit at the VA Home. Residents who might most benefit from the intervention were identified by the staff. Residents were selected who experienced frequent disruptive behaviors of dementia and/or were depressed or socially isolated.
She recently received service learning materials grants to purchase equipment such as headsets, MP3 player, and splitters to be used directly to implement a nursing intervention to dementia patients at the VA Home.