I’m pleased to share our latest evaluation of the Lullaby Project with Live Music Now (LMN), based on the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool and delivered as part of the hospital’s award-winning Arts for Health programme. The project is led by two exceptional LMN musicians, Georgina Aasgaard and Hedi Pinkerfeld, with funding from the Alder Hey Children’s Charity.
You can download the full research report here.
Pioneered by Carnegie Hall in New York, Lullaby is designed to support maternal mental health, early child development and family wellbeing, by pairing new mothers and families with professional musicians to co-create original lullabies for their babies.
Thanks to the generosity of the creative team, hospital staff and families, we were able to explore in depth, over a 12-month period, the practice and impact of the project in such a high-risk clinical setting. This included for example access to musicians’ reflective diaries, a qualitative dataset that could (repeatedly) break your heart and heal it again within the space of a few paragraphs.
Interviews with participating families evidence the power of music-making in providing personalised care strategies and therapeutic support; in lifting the atmosphere on the ward; and creating an affective human bond between families and staff. The ‘found poem’ – Music and everything that comes with it – was composed using excepts from verbatim research interview quotations included in the report. We hope this helps to communicate families’ reflections on and feelings towards the project in their own words.
My thanks to my research partner Dr Clare Maxwell, Liverpool John Moores University; Karen Irwin at Live Music Now; Vicky Charnock, Arts for Health Manager at Alder Hey and all who contributed to the evaluation.