Development of the ‘Museum Health and Social Care Service’ to promote the use of arts and cultural activities by health and social care professionals caring for older people

ABSTRACT

It is well documented that engagement in arts and cultural activities contributes to improving and maintaining the health and well-being of older people. Despite this, many health and social care professionals do not recognize or accept arts and cultural activities as relevant to their care remit. To address this, a team of 17 individuals comprising older service users, and staff from a range of health and social care, arts, and museum and archive services in North East England worked collaboratively to design and develop the Museum Health and Social Care Service (MHSCS). MHSCS is a resource and training package that reinforces the care and clinical benefits of arts and cultural activities to older people’s health and wellbeing, aimed at supporting health and social care professionals to acknowledge and use these activities as integral to care delivery.     

Do children who acquire word reading without explicit phonics employ compensatory learning? Issues of phonological recoding, lexical orthography, and fluency

Two studies were conducted across three countries to examine samples of beginning readers without systematic explicit phonics who had reached the same level of word reading accuracy as comparison samples with high and moderate explicit phonics. Had they employed any compensatory learning to reach that level? Four hypotheses of compensatory learning or performance were tested on the samples, all of which represented the lower half of the normative distribution of word reading accuracy. The two samples without explicit phonics received teaching that centered on story text reading and some receptive phonics that arose from this text reading. They did not compensate by relatively greater use of a larger psycholinguistic grain size in the form of rime units. Nor did they compensate by trading off comprehension for text word reading accuracy. In a microtraining study, they showed no compensation in proficiency of initial learning of lexical orthographic representations. For all samples, this initial learning was less effective with spelling than reading training trials. In reading text, the samples without explicit phonics did not compensate by trading off speed for accuracy, or comprehension. On the contrary, they read text faster than the explicit phonics samples. The extra classroom instruction time available to them for text reading, with the consequential extra exposure and practice of word reading, would explain this result.