Making Connections Thru Music

Brief summary (registry, in English)

Healthcare systems around the world, including within the United States, have long-established shortages of trained caregivers. The American Health Care Association states that "the health care system has experienced a shortage of trained caregivers for critical roles for some time." This scarcity directly impacts the 45,800 Long-Term Care (LTC) communities throughout the U.S. Concurrent with this staff shortage, more than half of LTC residents have some form of dementia. These two issues create a serious public health concern, since dementia is associated with a variety of behavioral expressions, such as aggression, anxiety, and agitation. Behavioral expressions of dementia can be successfully managed with the use of tailored, psychosocial interventions and communication support. Unfortunately, existing staff shortages make the facilitation of such interventions challenging. One powerful and often-overlooked approach to ameliorating staffing shortages involves the utilization of retired volunteers to facilitate interventions for persons with dementia (PWD). Based on the nearly universal love of music and a promising pilot study, the product to be developed and tested in this STTR will build upon the combined prior work of the Principal Investigators. Making Connections Thru Music (MCTM), an urgently needed product, will enable retired volunteers to facilitate an evidence-based music and discussion intervention with PWD. MCTM aims to improve engagement, enhance quality of life, and reduce behavioral expressions in PWD. The intervention will consist of two main components: (1) a comprehensive online training course for volunteers, which will provide a general overview of dementia, demonstrate effective communication strategies to use with PWD, and instruct volunteers to effectively facilitate MCTM sessions, and (2) an app containing a structured MCTM intervention protocol and toolkit, which will be the means by which volunteers facilitate MCTM. MCTM will be marketed to LTC communities.

What you commit to

• Study type: Interventional
• Planned participants: 196
• From 1 Dec 2025 to the primary completion date, 29 Apr 2027
• 2 sites in 1 country
• Visits and tests: ask the trial team, the registry does not list them

Built from the registry fields of ClinicalTrials.gov. It describes the study, not your situation.

Who cannot take part

Copied verbatim from ClinicalTrials.gov and grouped by topic. Only the trial team decides who can take part.

Who the study is looking for

Age in the registry: 18 years to 103 years · Sex: All · Accepts healthy volunteers

Full criteria on ClinicalTrials.gov

Sites (2)

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