“Everything from sadness…to absolute delirium”: Exploring the perspectives and experiences of key professional groups supporting live music services in UK care homes

Within UK care homes, live music programmes are promoted for the care and wellbeing of residents with dementia. These programmes are delivered via charitable music organisations and established orchestra outreach departments that specialise in providing live music sessions within this setting. However, the perspectives and experiences of key professional groups involved in the provision of these live music services are underrepresented within research. Namely, performing musicians, care assistants, activity coordinators and care home managers. To supplement this gap in research, this thesis aimed to explore the perspectives and experiences of these professional groups, with a focus on their views of the occupational factors, collaborative working and training of their work with care home live music programmes. These perspectives were explored through a series of nine ethnographic observations of live music programmes in UK care homes and in-depth semi-structured interviews with a total of 30 performing musicians and 44 care home staff. These data sets were subject to thematic analysis. The main thematic findings revealed a need for enhanced organisational approaches to live music programme delivery supplemented by a more extensive research evidence base and showed promise for approaching live music services as a multi-professional collaborative practice that is actively developed and realised from within the context of care homes and promotes shared learning of music and care-based occupations across these professional groups.