When the Dementia Care Hub in Hampshire wanted a way to bring the benefits of drumming and movement into their everyday work — not just for one afternoon, but for good — they didn’t book a one-off session. They invested in training their own team through Drums4Health.
Here’s what that looked like in practice. This clip shows a workshop attendee delivering her first session, she designed and picked the tune and the movements. Such joy!
Who
Sixteen staff members from across three Dementia Care Hub locations in Hampshire came together for a single training day, learning to deliver Drums4Health sessions themselves, to people living with dementia, their carers, families, and the wider community.
When and How Long
The training ran as a day on site, 10am to 3pm, giving enough time to move from first principles all the way through to each group planning and delivering their own mini-session by the end of the day.
Cost
- Training: £380
- Licence: £180
This one-off investment gives the Hub the skills and the licensed materials to run Drums4Health sessions in-house, as often as they like, without booking (and paying for) an external facilitator every time. Drums4Health now offer payment instalments via PayPal to help spread the cost of drums, training and licensing.
How the Day Worked
Tamsin travelled to Hampshire to deliver the training in person. The day combined:
- Practical, hands-on facilitation skills — not just theory, but how to actually lead a session with confidence
- The Drums4Health toolkit, ready to take away and use immediately
- The evidence base behind why drumming and movement work for people living with dementia
- Safe warm-up and cool-down practice, built in from the start so every session the team runs afterwards is delivered safely
- A practical assessment with a twist: by the afternoon, each of the small groups planned and delivered a real session to the rest of the room
What made this particularly striking is that none of the sixteen had any prior drumming, music therapy, or facilitation experience in this area. By 3pm, every single group had stood up and delivered. There was a lot of laughter along the way and, by the team’s own account, a lot of pride.
What They Can Do Now
Because the training builds skills within the Hub rather than relying on an outside provider, the team can now:
- Run Drums4Health sessions for people living with dementia, their carers and families, and the wider community, whenever they choose
- Repeat sessions as often as they like, with no ongoing cost per session
- Deliver to people they already know and have relationships with, which matters, because trust and familiarity are part of what makes a session work
- Build Drums4Health into regular, sustainable programming rather than a one-off event
- Tailor the music and the movement to each group and their needs.
Why This Model Matters
This is the difference between delivering a service and building capacity. A visiting facilitator can run a brilliant session and then leave. Training the people who are already there, who understand the individuals they support and have already built relationships with them, means the benefits carry on long after the training day ends.
It also means Dementia Care Hub can grow the programme sustainably: more sessions, more often, for more people, without it depending on budget for repeat bookings with an external supplier.
The Evidence Behind It
Drums4Health sessions combine rhythm, movement and connection — and there’s a growing evidence base for why each of those matters specifically for people living with dementia.
Grip and wrist strength are linked to healthy longevity. The repetitive gripping and wrist movement involved in drumming isn’t just enjoyable — it’s meaningful exercise. The PURE study, which followed almost 140,000 adults across 17 countries, found grip strength to be an even stronger predictor of mortality than blood pressure, with each 5kg drop linked to a noticeably higher risk of death (Leong et al., The Lancet, 2015). Norway’s Tromsø Study found the same pattern over 17 years, reinforcing grip strength as a genuine marker of healthy ageing.
Rhythm can remain accessible after language is lost. Dementia often affects spoken language early, but the ability to engage with rhythm and music tends to be far more resilient. Clinical case studies describe people who had lost much of their verbal memory and language while still able to play previously learned music, and researchers studying semantic dementia have documented musical knowledge surviving well after language has broken down. This is part of why music and movement-based approaches, like Drums4Health, can reach people at stages of dementia where conversation alone may no longer work.
You can read more about the Drums4Health approach to dementia care here: drums4health.com/drums4dementia
What’s Next
The Dementia Care Hub team are now working with Tamsin to capture evidence and data from their own delivery, feeding real-world outcomes back into the development of safe, evidence-informed Drums4Health practice. It’s a genuine two-way partnership: the Hub gets a sustainable, in-house activity, and Drums4Health gets richer evidence of what works in the field.
The Difference It Makes
For the Hub, this training means confident staff, a ready-to-use toolkit, and the freedom to run sessions whenever they’re needed — for individuals, for carers, and for the community as a whole.
For the people they support, it means more opportunities to move, drum, laugh and connect, delivered by people who already know them.
That’s what sustainable community wellbeing looks like: giving people the skills and confidence to create something that keeps going long after the training day is over.
Move. Drum. Connect.
Want to bring this to your own team? Find out more about Drums4Health training for dementia care at drums4health.com/drums4dementia.
