The Artful Moments Program traces its beginnings to more than 10 years ago when a new dementia wing was being built at St. Peter’s Hospital. Janis was the clinical manager of this wing and Maureen was a clinical nurse specialist. We were gifted with funding to purchase art from the AGH, and thus began a relationship between Laurie Kilgour-Walsh from the AGH and the dementia clinical team at St. Peter’s as she helped in choosing the artwork along with the patients living in the new wing.
Following this collaboration, a study funded by the Ontario Arts Council and Hamilton Health Sciences Foundation was conducted for 10 months in 2013/14 with patients in the middle to late stages of dementia at St. Peter’s and their family members. Thus the first iteration of “Artful Moments” was born with 45 minutes of art appreciation followed by 45 minutes of art making provided by artists from the AGH who came to St. Peter’s once weekly while the participants went to the AGH for the program once a month.
When we both retired from St. Peter’s we were recruited by Laurie to become volunteer docents completing the docent training in 2017. We then worked with Laurie to develop “Artful Moments” for persons in the early stages of dementia who were living in the community. Laurie obtained a grant from the Ontario Trillium Foundation to hold a series of four programs during 2018 (with six sessions in each program) at the AGH. Each session included 45 minutes of art appreciation and 45 minutes of art making linked by a common theme. AGH staff facilitated both portions of the session while we, as volunteer docents, helped facilitate communication with the participants.
In 2019 the AGH obtained funding from TD Bank Group to continue offering the program at the AGH and we continued as volunteer docents with the program with another colleague, Sonia Rogers, joining us in this role.
When the pandemic hit in 2020 the program was put on hold. Starting in 2021 Laurie engaged us to help develop a virtual “Artful Moments” on Zoom that proved to be very successful. Several virtual programs were held from 2021 until June 2022 when we started back to the AGH with a hybrid program – one week on Zoom and one week at the AGH – the most recent program ended after 12 sessions in early June.
Laurie was successful in 2022 in receiving a large grant from the Public Health Agency of Canada to develop a curriculum online to support museums/art galleries across Canada in creating programs of their own for people living with dementia. We worked with Laurie over the past year along with two of our former colleagues from St. Peter’s to develop a six-module e-learning program; Artful Moments: Shared Learning which was launched last month across Canada.
Our role as volunteer docents has been very varied – facilitating communication with participants who attend the program, as well as offering some education for AGH staff and volunteers on interacting with persons with dementia who come to the gallery; and developing, implementing, and evaluating “Artful Moments” along with Laurie as it has continued to grow. Evaluation of the program has evolved from focusing on the engagement of the participants to how these sessions can enhance the well-being of each participant living with cognitive impairment. It has been an extremely rewarding experience for both of us in our retirement as we are using our past work experiences and coupling that with a whole new learning experience for us – the world of art! Thank you to the AGH for their commitment to this very important program, and for including and welcoming persons with dementia and their families into the gallery.
