To meet the care needs of the rapidly ageing patient populations, the cultivation of a compassionate patient-centred healthcare culture has become central in the value-based healthcare discourse. A participatory music practice, ‘Meaningful Music in Healthcare’ employs a person-centred approach to music-making in Dutch hospitals. A grounded theory analysis on ethnographically collected data suggests that music-making serves as a social change agent and cultural resource for catalysing compassionate contact between healthcare professionals and patients. Processes of experiential growth and shared values in music-making and healthcare help to enrich care relationships and allow the emotional dimension of nurses’ professional performance to be explored.
As a result of the COVID-19 measures, many people experienced social isolation and a lack of meaningful contact, especially vulnerable elderly people. For a specific group of musicians specialized in person-centred artistically-led participatory practices in healthcare settings, this sparked the exploration of migrating their live practice online, by making use of video-calling technology. From a ‘lifelong learning’ perspective—which considers musicians as being capable of responding to societal change by creating new, meaningful artistic practices—such a sudden migration from offline to online, under the exceptional circumstances at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, created an instant challenge for the musicians to demonstrate their flexibility and adaptability. On the other hand, the limits caused by the conditions and immediacy of this response, combined with a feeling of diminished humanness in virtual interaction, seemed to jeopardize the person-centred values that the work of this group is built upon.This article explores this issue by expanding on the musicians’ flexibility towards personcentredness and their attempts to safeguard these values when they suddenly switch from a ‘physical’ to ‘virtual’ space.
Since 2015, the research group Lifelong Learning in Music of Hanze University of Applied Sciences Groningen, together with the University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG), has developed and researched the MiMiC practice for patients and nurses on surgical wards. The musicians make tailor-made music in the patients' rooms in collaboration with patients and nurses. They do this on the basis of verbal and non-verbal contact with patients and nurses. Person-centred music-making turns out to be easy to realise in a medical setting and to be meaningful for all involved. People who have just had surgery experience less pain. Nurses feel more deeply involved with their patients. Musicians show sensitivity for the social context in which they carry out their artistic practice.In this project the research group is developing an innovative artistic practice with a focus on elderly patients. Musicians work with patients and the care staff that are taking care of these patients during their stay in hospital. The research should lead to insights in the effects of this practice and to a new training for master students and professional musicians who want wish to specialise themselves in this field. Pilots on six different wards of the UMCG with professional musicians and master students are part of the research which will last two years in its entirety. The project has been granted funding from the 'Banning de Jong Fonds' of the national 'Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds' and the 'Fonds Sluyterman van Loo'.
