‘People do deep emotional, spiritual and psychological work when they create art products, especially when they are supported by an experienced arts therapist’ (Bolton 2008).

This poster reviews and highlights the benefits of attending weekly ‘Creative Therapy Burst’ sessions provided for day service patients in a hospice setting. The groups are facilitated by the hospice music therapist and are planned and facilitated in collaboration with the multi-disciplinary day service team (registered nurses, clinical support workers and volunteers).

Although the creative arts are already used widely in this setting, this approach enables all patients to regularly have access to different types of therapeutic, creative arts group sessions, whereas in the past these types of sessions may have been limited to individual work or group sessions using only one of the creative arts (e.g. music or art).

These sessions have been in place since January 2022 and include the following activities: Creative Music Making (including improvisation), Japanese Haiku composition (from Luminate Scotland series of activities), The Lost Words (using this publication to explore our own ‘lost words’), music and relaxation sessions, creating pots with air drying clay, music and gentle movement, song writing, music and the emotions, virtual museum tours and reminiscing using music.

This adult hospice provides a rehabilitative approach to care and support and patients, alongside staff, identify aims and goals to focus on over a 10 week period of weekly attendance. As part of these aims and goals the team find the use of the creative arts beneficial to give their patients opportunities for creativity, shared experience, relaxation and stimulation.

The poster will show examples of these activities alongside quantitative and qualitative data collected from patient and staff.