Please share your best ideas to create meaningful engagement with dementia sufferers.

[BentFork]

I'm newly working in a care setting and my job is to do meaningful activities with dementia residents. What I mainly observe is:

• a flat 'no' (with raised flat of hand) when encouraged/offered activity.
• People who can converse a little bit in a very fractured way, but who are only interested in getting out/going home.
• People who are bedridden & non-verbal.

I have had lots of training to understand the dementia experience but almost nothing in how to deliver meaningful enriching activities. Music, games, art & craft & exercise are 99.5% ignored. My day is 8hrs. It's a very long time to be pushing against a closed door. Any ideas?

I am to find a way of saying this without being rude.

How much training have you had if you refer to dementia sufferers?

There are so many resources out there, I'm not sure Mumsnet is the place to ask (slightly worrying for those with family members in care homes). I assume the first thing you've done.is contact napa and check their website?

Music, music, music!

Research the music that would have been popular when they were in their teens and 20s, or when they were bringing up their children, or TV/radio theme tunes from the same era.

I used to work with people with dementia, and I was/am a singer, and music always sparked a bit of life.

We had some nonverbal patients who would sing.

And one lady who was so loist that she did not even know a chair was for sitting on. But if you parked her on a piano stool you would be treated to Chopin, Beethoven ......... extraordinary.