Joss refers to a perception of the use of the arts in health services as something to be commended, but low priority. This means organisations such as ourselves sometimes have to turn to third parties for our work in health settings, despite its obvious positive effects.

This magazine article echoes what our own staff working in health environments have said recently. At a recent Mersey Care conference, TRO’s Eleanor McCann argued that cultural practices in health settings should be considered ‘integral’ rather than ‘additional’. In her recent article, Katie Clark spoke of the positive impact Get Into Reading has had on people suffering from dementia:

…the power of language and the rhythms of poetry can soothe and calm, and also remove barriers in bringing people together.

Our ongoing work just goes to show how effective reading aloud together is. Not just with people who regularly use health services, but people in community groups, looked after children, prisoners and many more people have experienced numerous positives following TRO’s participation in their lives.

Joss says that in order for the arts to be given more opportunities in health care environments, research must be expanded so that funders can see quantifiable, results-based evidence of impact. The culture of research is constantly progressing amongst cultural organisations, something Joss acknowledges:

As research progresses, a shift becomes possible from grant-dependency to earned income – for services attuned to the NHS’s needs and fees large enough to cover the arts organisations’ costs. The Reader Organisation  is one of the leaders. It “renews the now lost sense of literature as a life-enhancing creative power”. It brings groups together to share and discuss literature – from the accessible to Dante and Milton. (Although these can be accessible! – ed) It has fee income from several NHS Trusts including Merseyside’s large mental health trust.

Let’s hope that following Tim Joss’ brilliant article other NHS Trusts begin to utilise the arts more, leading to an even better health service.

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Don’t forget you can like The Reader Organisation on Facebook or follow us on Twitter!

There are 750,000 people living with dementia in the UK, two-thirds of whom live in their own homes in the community, while one-third live in care homes.

Based on a survey of 1,436 people with dementia and carers and 989 home care workers, ‘Support. Stay. Save.’ found that lack of support for full time carers was leading to people being forced to move into care homes or even be admitted to hospital, unnecessarily.

Kevin Whately, who is an ambassador for the Alzheimer’s Society pointed out that,

‘Reassuringly, this report also demonstrates that there is a care workforce out there which really wants to do everything it can to help vulnerable people such as those with dementia. However, they need more training and more time and we need to mend the crumbling system within which they operate.’

Training and Time are two words which seem to crop up again and again when talking about care for those with dementia and the lack of both appear key in creating the ‘crumbling system’ described here.

Get Into Reading is working with Wigan Memory Service to deliver reading groups for people with dementia who are living at home and their carers. Four members of the Memory Service team have undertaken training to facilitate GIR groups as part of a network of support groups which help people remain socially engaged in their local community and keep minds active. We are keen to develop this work across the UK and offer more people the opportunity to join a group. If you are interested in getting involved, please contact Katie Clark katieclark@thereader.org.uk

You can read the full report here

Here’s an excerpt describing the presence of GIR in Ireland:

In Ireland, GIR has a single pilot project, operating at the Hydebank female prison in east Belfast. Patricia Canning began working there last July. “The women were very receptive to the idea. They are frighteningly honest, refreshingly so.” Each session of the Hydebank reading group lasts about two hours. In its first week the group read Faith and Hope Go Shopping, a Joanne Harris story about two old ladies going on the run from an old people’s home. “There was a bit of a cheer when they escaped,” she says.

She has nothing but praise for the training she received from The Reader Organisation, which has appointed her a GIR project worker for the next three years. Like many of the organisation’s staff, Canning is engaged in academic research, as well as organising a reading group. To go into a women’s prison on a lousy day, she says, and to hear a woman say at the end of a reading session, “I feel I’ve just gone outside for a walk”, is strong testimony indeed. “I’m going to bring a Shakespearean sonnet in in the next few weeks and really blow them away, ” she says

While she was in Liverpool, Ann Marie visited TRO project worker Eleanor McCann’s reading group at the Kevin White Detox Unit, and was inspired by what she saw:

The extract being read is from The Catcher in the Rye . There is no shortage of people wanting to read aloud. In the extract, JD Salinger’s hero, Holden Caulfield, had briefly remembered a headmaster he had not liked – Mr Haas – because the man would not talk to the poorer parents of children at the school. It is only a passing reference, not even a paragraph. But it sparked memories from the young men present of how teachers had treated them and their own parents. Then one man goes to his room to get the non-fiction book, D-Day, to read us his favourite reminiscence from it.

At the end of the article,  GIR group member Tony offers an explanation for why GIR works so well:

“Ever since people have been on the earth, for the past two million years, they have sat round the fire and told stories and listened to stories. It sustains people. It’s in the genes, you see. It’s natural. I see these reading groups as an enhanced version of that.”

You can read the full article here.

Don’t foget! We’ll be holding a Showcase in Northern Ireland on the 22nd February.

• Dementia is significantly affecting every health and social care system in the world.
• Dementia care costs around 1 percent of the world’s gross domestic product (GDP).
• If dementia care were a country, it would be the world’s 18th largest economy (ranking between Turkey and Indonesia).
• By 2030, worldwide societal costs will increase by 85 percent (a very conservative estimate considering only increases in the number of people with dementia).

You can read a summary of the report here: http://www.alz.org/documents/national/World_Alzheimer_Report_2010_Summary(1).pdf

ADI are calling for global action to address what the authors, Professor Anders Wimo and Professor Martin Prince are calling ‘the most significant health crises of the 21^st century’. Professor Prince urged nations to develop better plans for caring for the millions who have the disease. “The care of people with dementia is not just a health issue – it is a massive social issue,” he said.

Actress Lynda Bellingham has been speaking out about her family’s experience of the disease. Five years ago she lost her adoptive mother, Ruth, to Alzheimer’s disease; only a year later she learnt that her birth mother, Marjorie, also has the condition. She has spoken about the way in which she noticed, following Ruth’s diagnosis in the late 90’s that no one talked about the Alzheimer’s.

 People are scared to death of even hearing the word dementia, but someone is diagnosed with it in the UK every three minutes…It affects at least 750,000 people and costs the economy £23 billion a year, twice the cost of cancer, three times the cost of heart disease. Yet in 2007-08, cancer research received £248.2 million, while dementia research received just £32.34 million. As a subject it’s just not sexy.

But surely with these latest findings things must change. It shouldn’t just be on one day a year that the news headlines draw attention to the millions living with this disease. If it is to be dealt with, there needs to be action. More money needs to be committed to research, to supporting carers who look after loved ones and to improving the quality of care that people living with Alzheimer’s receive.

At The Reader Organisation we are passionate about the positive effects that shared reading can have for those living with dementia. Over the last four years delivering Get Into Reading in dementia care homes we have seen firsthand the impact it has, with outcomes including improved communication skills, improved concentration and the ability to be calm in difficult situations. One care worker recently commented

I have seen the effect that it has on people; people that I didn’t think had that in them. It was a shock for me, I hadn’t heard them talking like that before, but the poems brought something out of them and you could see they were enjoying it, and they were all talking together and listening to one another. You don’t usually get that here.

Even more encouraging is the feedback we have had from residents themselves who talk about how poetry has had a positive effect on their mood or state of mind:

I like this…I like it because sometimes when I’m a bit lost I can’t think about it, but this helps me to go through and see it there and think.

Reading group member, Redholme Memory Care Home

In light of these outcomes, we have established a research partnership with the University of Liverpool and we are working to secure funding to further explore the benefits of reading to people living with dementia.

We are also delivering training for care home staff so that they can deliver GIR groups and one to one reading sessions with the people they work with and incorporate them into their practice, creating a sustainable model.

At the end of this month, our first book A Little, Aloud: An anthology of poetry and prose for reading aloud to someone you care for is being published. This is a selection of the very best prose and poetry chosen especially for reading aloud, all tried and tested by us and with lively reading notes and ideas based on actual discussions from our ‘Get Into Reading’ groups. Fiona Phillips, who has spoken out about caring for her parents, who both developed dementia, has commended the book saying

Reading aloud brings health and happiness: guaranteed! I urge you to buy this book, read the wonderful (and funny, surprising, thought-provoking) pieces collected here to someone you care for and see the results for yourself.

It is our hope that this book will provide inspiration for family members, friends and care staff to share some time reading aloud with someone they care for and talking together about what they read. It is a small but significant way in which we can all take action and brighten the day of someone living with dementia. It would be a wonderful thing, if by World Alzheimer’s Day 2011 we could see the positive impact being had in care homes across the country through shared reading.

To find out more/order your copy of A Little, Aloud click here...

All royalties in full go to The Reader Organisation.

This group is taking place at a care home for people living with dementia. Each year, 100,000 people in the UK develop dementia. Most of us know someone whose life has been touched by it in some way, but there is still so much we do not know about dementia, and to this point, no known cure. This week marks Dementia Awareness Week, with the Alzheimer’s Society launching their ‘Remember the Person’ campaign, encouraging people to think about those they know living with dementia and about simple things they can do to make life for them more manageable and enjoyable.

The Reader Organisation has been delivering Get Into Reading with people living with dementia since October 2007. At first we were not sure how successful this group would be – whether people would respond to the reading and enjoy taking part. We thought we may need to alter our model and adapt it to suit residents who had developed dysphasia or hearing and eyesight problems. In fact, the model has proved incredibly powerful, the only change from other groups being that we use poetry, rather than prose. We find that poetry receives a much better response, the rhyme and rhythm holding concentration and enabling people to get a real feel for the language. Some people even join in with poems they don’t know, guessing the rhyming words themselves. Often at the end of a session reading group members go back and re-read one line over again. Each line of poetry is so full of meaning, and people can single out one line or phrase and tease it out, talking about why they like it or feel drawn to it. The reading group has given the pleasure of reading back to people who were once keen readers but have recently found it difficult to manage.

For those living in care, Get Into Reading offers a space where no one is rushed, we listen to one another with the poem as our shared focus and as a result a community is built up around the poem. There is real communication. Staff members are able to engage with the people they care for in a different way, people living side by side can learn something of the lives of their neighbours and learn to see them as a whole person, not just in their current situation. There is discussion, laughter, surprise and serious thought as we ponder the lines and individual words of poems and dig for the meaning behind them. And the experience lasts beyond the group sessions themselves. One lady told me recently,

sat in front of that television all day you do get bored. I love the poems. When I’m on my own in the evening I read them through again and I spot a line that picks me up and gives me the lift I needed.

The community aspect of the group is vital. When asked to describe the group, one resident said,

It’s a little group where we all come together. We look at things together and it doesn’t matter, if you want to come along you can and you will be welcomed by the people there and you can join in.

It strikes me as I read this that the word ‘together’ is key. This is not an isolated experience, the idea of ‘joining in’ and being welcomed by others is crucial. But sometimes it can be hard to forge those links that make communication happen. I have watched many people sitting side by side in the lounge, not engaging with one another. Loud televisions make this even more difficult. There are times when someone is having a bad day and just wants to shun any human contact, retreating into their own world. But even in these situations the poems have opened doors and even transformed moods.

During one session I read ‘Sea Fever’ by John Masefield: ‘I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and sky’. One very quiet gentleman picked up the poem and immediately began reading it confidently aloud. It was the first time I had heard him speak. I asked if he had seen the poem before. ‘I’ve not seen it. But I’ve read it before,’ he told me. He read well and when we began talking about it told us,

It’s about old sailors, in other words me! I was one. It was very good. I had a good one [ship] and I liked the job, the people. It wasn’t hard work physically but it was repetitive, doing the same thing a lot. We went to lots of places but I can’t remember the names now.

He got talking and told us that his father worked on the markets all his life, which reminded a lady in the group of her own father who also worked on the markets. They engaged in a lively discussion about the work and the people they both knew. In the midst of the excited talk going on about these families, another lady in the group turned to me and, pointing to the other two, said,

People say they can’t see anything, but they do, you see, they can talk about it and it is the old talk.

At The Reader Organisation we would like to see Get Into Reading groups taking place in care homes across the country. We are delivering Read to Lead training for staff working in care homes so that the model can grow sustainable roots in the ground where it is most needed. It has been a joy to see people getting excited about using Get Into Reading with the people they work with and care for on a daily basis. When asked why he had come on the training, one care worker replied:

There are a lot of people living here with a lot to offer, but we need to put them in a position to get that out of them, to ignite that spark. I think the poetry can do that and I’m here to learn how to use it.

The degree is the first in this country to combine literary study and community work throughout the programme. Each student will have the opportunity to study a full range of literature in English and also to run a reading group in the community (or at their workplace) as part of their studies.

More information here.

A similar both sides  of the same feeling comes from reading William Blake’s poem ‘Infant joy’ alongside  his ‘Infant sorrow’.  Mr Field says in an interview in  the current issue of The Reader that mistakes, political, social, personal – come from not allowing complexity: ‘the heresies of all time are not the preaching of untruth; they are usually the preaching of a single truth without being buttressed by another truth.’  He’s right again, and I’m glad to say that  that buttressing one truth by another – sometimes diametrically opposed – is exactly what literature  does for us. No wonder reading, like breakfast, helps brain formation.

So we’re ready, Frank, when called to create reading for pleasure programmes for parents! Four years ago, Kerry Hughes, a young single parent who worked for The Reader Organisation put together a collection of readings for parents involved in our Get Into Reading project. Texts ranging from Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Before You Were Mine’ to Charles Dickens’ Dombey and Son (one of the best books about parent child relationships ever written, connecting bad parenting to bad business practice, too: you’d like it, Frank) and it’s not just English literature, either: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart , Tolstoi’s Family Happiness , Theodore Roethke’s poem ‘My Papa’s Waltz’.

When are we going to realise that ‘literature’ is a technology for the  brain to brain, heart to heart transplant of useful human  information? Reading is an evolutionary tool, and great  books are there not for syllabi and exams, but for personal, human and social use. There are many great poems about parenthood/childhood. Coventry Patmore’s ‘The Toys’, is onesuch. You may need to translate  it out of  a Victorian Christian sensibility.  But it’s worth the effort involved in such translation.

The Toys

My little son, who looked from thoughtful eyes
And moved and spoke in quite grown-up wise,
Having my law the seventh time disobeyed,
I struck him and dismissed
With hard words and unkissed,
His Mother, who was patient, being dead.
Then, fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep
I visited his bed,
But found him slumbering deep,
With darkened eyelids, and their lashes yet.
From his late sobbing wet.
And I, with moan,
Kissing away his tears, left others of my own;
For, on a table drawn beside his head,
He had put, within his reach,
A box of counters and a red-veined stone,
A piece of glass abraded by the beach,
And six or seven shells,
A bottle with bluebells,
And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art,
To comfort his sad heart.
So when that night I prayed
To God, I wept, and said:
Ah, when at last we lie with trancèd breath,
Not vexing Thee in death,
And Thou rememberest of what toys
We made our joys,
How weakly understood
Thy great commanded good,
Then, fatherly not less
Than I whom Thou hast moulded from the clay,
Thou’lt leave Thy wrath, and say,
“I will be sorry for their childishness.”

Coventry Patmore

One of my favourites, David Constantine’s poem ‘New Year Behind the Asylum’, featured in Kerry’s wonderful collection, and David Constantine won’t mind I’m sure that I’m going to reprint it here. He’s in the revolution, too.

New Year Behind the Asylum

There was the noise like when the men in droves
Are hurrying to the match only this noise was
Everybody hurrying to see the New Year in
In town under the clock but we, that once,

He said would I come our usual Saturday walk
And see it in out there in the open fields
Behind the asylum. Even on sunny days
How it troubled me more and more the nearer we got

And he went quiet and as if he was ashamed
For what he must always do, which was
Go and grip the bars of the iron gates and stand
Staring into the garden until they saw him.

They were like the animals, so glad and shy
Like overgrown children dressed in things
Handed down too big or small and they came in a crowd
And said hello with funny chunnering noises

And through the bars, looking so serious,
He put his empty hand out. But that night
We crept past quickly and only stopped
In the middle of the empty fields and there

While the clock in the square where the normal people stood
And all the clocks in England were striking twelve
We heard the rejoicings for the New Year
From works and churches and the big ships in the docks

So faint I wished we were hearing nothing at all
We were so far away in our black fields
I felt we might not ever get back again
Where the people were and it was warm, and then

Came up their sort of rejoicing out of the asylum,
Singing or sobbing I don’t know what it was
Like nothing on earth, their sort of welcoming in
Another New Year and it was only then

When the bells and the cheerful hooters couldn’t be heard
But only the inmates, only the poor mad people
Singing or sobbing their hearts out for the New Year
That he gripped me fast and kissed my hair

And held me in against him and clung on tight to me
Under a terrible number of bare stars
So far from town and the lights of house and home
And shut my ears against the big children crying

But listened himself, listened and listened
That one time. And I’ve thought since and now
He’s dead I’m sure that what he meant was this:
That I should know how much love would be needed.

David Constantine

Arts About Manchester (AAM) and Mission Models Money (MMM) are working together to answer these questions and attempt to unearth what makes great leaders in the arts & cultural sector.

By completing this survey you are contributing vital information. Not only will you be participating in unique and ground-breaking research that will advance knowledge of the UK arts & cultural sector into wholly new territories, you will also be learning about yourself.

You can receive a free personalised report that compares your responses to others and suggests points to reflect upon. You may also benefit from being involved in further research to enhance your personal and professional development.

Please note all answers are confidential and will be analysed anonymously.

START SURVEY

One of the primary goals in the Mission Models Money (MMM) programme is to help individuals and organisations in the arts & cultural sector become better equipped to thrive in an increasingly fast changing, complex and uncertain world.

The People Theme research seeks to understand the competencies, qualities and attributes needed, how they can be developed, and how contexts can be influenced to enable these competencies, qualities and attributes to flourish. This survey is one part of that research which will be published in late January 2010.

This survey will take a minimum of 20 minutes to complete. As it must be completed in one go, please make sure you allocate enough time. The deadline for completing the survey is 14th September 2009.

For more information about the People Theme research and the MMM programme visit www.missionmodelsmoney.org.uk.

Thank you very much for your time.

http://www.aam.org.uk/survey/2009/Thrivinginthe21stCentury.htm

In this report, Sir Jim Rose identifies that the language aquisition of children entering primary education needs to be addressed. It’s shocking: children from deprived socio-economic backgrounds arrive at school with a vocabulary of around 500 words (and often are unable to string a sentence together), which compared to the 6,000 words that children from more affluent backgrounds come with, elucidates the magnitude of the problem. We don’t know yet how this issue will be addressed but it is hoped that Sir Jim Rose’s report will lead to some action being taken by the government.

We need to work out a stratgegy to enable children to aquire the language they need in order to express themsleves and to understand difficult and complex issues and challenges. Through our outreach work with  Get Into Reading and Liverpool Reads, we have learnt that not only reading and not only reading aloud but  reading more challenging books aloud with children (and adults) not only increases their vocabulary and therefore improves literacy but it also gives them an emotional language – a way to express themselves.  If this is not done, if children are unable to learn this vital vocabulary, then it will be only their feet they use and not their minds: the book will be booted out.

On Wednesday 14th January, The Reader Organisation and The Lancet hosted an event at the Wellcome Collection, London to open up a discussion about the relationship between reading and health. You can read about the event, see the photographs and download an audio recording on our website.

We have had some post-event thoughts and feel that we need to discuss the importance of reading aloud further.

“A difficulty is a light”, Valéry.

We can’t stress enough how important the reading aloud aspect of Get Into Reading is!

When a book, or poem, is read aloud, it comes to life as a physical presence in the group. This coming to life allows people to engage with the text more readily: it is opened up and shared. Even if the text is difficult or not everyone in the group decides to read aloud, everyone is together on the same page, at the same time and assisting one another to get through it. This makes the experience not only a social one but it also turns a scary challenge into an enjoyable, shared one.

We would like to discuss this further – we are in the process of setting up a wiki for this purpose, we’ll notify you when this is up and running – and hope that within the next few months we will be able to host a further seminar specifically on the subject of reading aloud and its importance for health and wellbeing.

Please let us know if this would be of interest to you. If there are any further issues around reading and health that you would like to see investigated in greater depth, we would welcome your suggestions for other seminars in the future.

Interested in becoming a Get Into Reading facilitator? Visit our Read to Lead Training pages to find out how.