To help our home care clients better cope with the stresses and challenges of lockdown, Alcedo Care Blackpool Care Ambassador, Paul Wilson, has been using dance to lift the spirits and improve the mobility of our home care clients in the Blackpool and Fylde area.
Paul, who has been with Alcedo Care for a year, is currently completing his BA (Hons) degree in Dance at Edge Hill University, and for the past 6 months has used his extensive dance knowledge and skills to work with Alcedo Home Care clients.
With their permission Paul has delivered therapeutic dance sessions to clients, either dancing for them, or with them, to raise their spirits, give them an emotional release and help them manage their lockdown stress.
Not only have Paul’s dance sessions helps lift the spirits and ease the tensions of lockdown for Alcedo home care clients, but in many cases where they have joined in the sessions, clients have also reported improved mobility and a lower incidence of aches and pains.
Bringing dance to home care clients
Paul feels that bringing dance to home care clients is very important. This is because younger people have easier access to dance, for example by watching it online. However, the older generation may not have the same online computer access and therefore could be limited to watching dance programmes on television, such as Strictly Come Dancing, which is one of the most popular programmes on television. So, making dance more accessible to the older generation is filling an important gap.
Indeed, for many home care clients Paul’s therapeutic dance session is the highlight of their week and the positive outcomes of relief from stress and improved mobility amply demonstrates the benefits it can bring.
University research project
With this in mind and with the benefit of his Alcedo Care experience, Paul’s university research project will be entitled “To what extent can dance benefit individuals within a domiciliary healthcare setting?”
To gather the data for his research project, Paul will continue to work with Alcedo Care, using ethnographic research methods to establish how dance can be safely integrated into a domiciliary setting, and how and to what degree dance can improve and enrich the lives of home care clients.
Based on the results of his research, Paul will then make a series of recommendations as to how dance should be adopted in all domiciliary settings, to improve the mental and physical aspects of home care clients lives.
We wish Paul all the very best with his university research and look forward to publishing his eagerly awaited results on the Alcedo Care website later this summer.
