Life3A is thrilled to announce the formalisation of our collaborative partnership with Attuned Health.
This Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) formalises the cooperative commitment between Life3A and Attuned Health to optimise knowledge, undertake research, co-design enabling strategies, and advance the understanding and capacity of the built environment and the role of Architecture in enabling and empowering residents and staff in care homes and aged care facilities to leverage from the power and connectivity of music.
Attuned Health is a unique music therapy service provider, working systematically to advocate for positive change in the use of music in healthcare settings. For Attuned Health, music therapy is about empowering all adults to intentionally use music as a tool that fosters good mental and physical health, wellbeing and functioning. Working with individuals, organisations and systems to build this capacity – within neurodivergent and reablement frameworks – they view music as a fundamental tool to enhance connection, self-expression, identity and brain function. Ultimately aiming to empower all adults to engage strategically with music in a personal, meaningful and preferred ways that optimise their comfort, quality of life, and functioning.
“We are thrilled to be partnering with Life3A which represents an exciting step forward in integrating music, neurology, psychology and sociology into build environment design and architecture. This is a significant opportunity to drive change in the use of music across the broader ecosystem of aged care, healthcare and disability living. The partnership will be a leader in advancing how music is embedded as a fundamental component of enabling environments. It will leverage music therapy research to design evidence-based spaces that enable the power of music to promote connection, comfort, personal wellbeing and functioning.” – Hayley Antipas, Founder and Director of Attuned Health
Under this MOU, Life3A and Attuned Health commit to collaborating on projects and initiatives which look to inform better practice, advance our understanding, and deliver practicable applications and solutions which ultimately provide beneficial outcomes for residents and staff specifically within the aged care, healthcare, and disability sectors.
Nikki Beckman, Director of Research at Life3A had this to say on the announcement:
“This is such an exciting announcement for Life3A – and a significant commitment towards how we want to steer the conversations and thinking around the future of disability accommodation and residential aged care design. This partnership represents a new frontier of evidence-based and multi-disciplinary design collaboration exploring the connective power of music across motor, cognition, communication, psychological, and socio-spatial domains. Collaborating with Attuned Health is a significant opportunity to advance our understanding of the power of music – as a master connector – to ultimately work together to create truly enabling and empowering environments and experiences for residents, their families, and for staff.”
The partnership will look to co-develop a Connection to Music Design Strategy, providing an evidence-based design framework to creating built environments and communities which enable and promote greater connectivity to and use of music – not just in the provision of appropriate spaces and conditions – but importantly, offering ways in which connectivity to music can underpin the overarching design philosophy, embedding itself within the architecture, and enhanced through the activities and enjoyment of everyday life.
Research themes will touch on: belonging; identify; creating a sense of place; familiarity and comfort; connectivity to self, to people, to place and to purpose; education, re-training, rehabilitation.
The anticipated outcomes of this partnership and research will contribute knowledge in the field of enabling environmental design; embedding music as a fundamental tool to improving the lives and environments of people living with neurological conditions, including dementia; and the family members, friends and healthcare professionals who support them.
If you would like to understand more about this cooperative partnership or would like to discuss how Life3A and our cooperative partners might be able to assist your organisation by curating a tailored research project, please reach out to our Director of Research, Nikki Beckman.
Additionally, if you think your organisation would be a valuable cooperative partner to Life3A, we would love to hear from you and to make it happen. Please reach out to our Director of Research, Nikki Beckman for next steps.