Creative Journeys Report 2019

Creative Journeys 39 leave her when she had to attend to other residents. Additionally, staff could sometimes be unhelpful in the sessions and this was partly because of the assumptions they held about resident’s capability in relation to physical or cognitive impairments. In this sense, existing relationships between staff and residents could in fact be counterproductive. In addition, a lack of understanding from staff about the intention behind, and the process of, participatory arts could also act as a barrier to their success. [T]hey didn’t quite understand the way that we were going to be working with people and so that made the first session really, really difficult. (Stage one arts facilitator) We started off with quite a challenging relationship with the staff, just because of the nature of what we’re doing, which they’re just not familiar with at all… I find that in a lot of care homes that I work in, that there’s always a period of time, at the very beginning, where you’re almost having to work on connecting with the staff more than residents, in some ways. (Stage one arts facilitator) It is also important to note that a further barrier to the development of resident and staff relationships was that some residents perceived that wider care staff were not interested in the arts activities they had been doing and some staff members would consequently not talk to them about what they had been doing. Having said this, in the survey participants were asked whether there were any barriers to providing arts activities and 20 per cent of respondents identified staff time, while only 9 per cent identified staff attitudes as a barrier, as shown in figure 2 below. The other major barriers identified were related to the capacity of the residents and funding. Figure 2: Barriers to providing arts activities in care homes Capacity of the residents Funding Staff time Space available Staff attitudes Prioritising other activites Other Number of residents in the home 13 (23.6%) 13 (23.6%) 11 (20%) 6 (10.9%) 5 (9.1%) 5 (9.1%) 2 (3.6%) 0