What is the Evidence for the Activities of Namaste Care? A Rapid Assessment Review

Abstract Objectives: To assess the quality of research evidence for the different activity components for the psycho-social Namaste Care intervention for care home residents with advanced dementia. Design: Namaste Care is a multi-component intervention delivered on a daily basis to people living with advanced dementia or people at end of life with dementia. A significant part of its operationalisation within care homes is the delivery of a number of activities delivered by trained in-house Namaste Care workers to a group of residents with similar high dependency needs. The Namaste Care workers focus on touch, music, nature, sensory experience, aromas and interactions with objects delivered in a way to enhance feelings of enjoyment and wellbeing. This review evaluated the evidence for using these activities with people living with advanced dementia. A systematic search of peer-reviewed research articles was conducted between November 2016 and September 2018 using search terms of activities used in Namaste Care. The quality of each accepted article was rated using the Rapid Evidence Assessment scale. Results: The initial literature search returned 1341 results: 127 articles including 42 reviews were included. The majority of activity interventions yielded between 10 and 20 peer-reviewed papers. The use of smells and aromas, interacting with animals and dolls, the use of various forms of music (e.g. background music, singing, personalised music), nature, lighting, various forms of touch/massage and sensory interventions (including Snoezelen) all appear to have proven efficacy with people living with advanced dementia. Conclusions: There is generally a limited number of research papers and reviews in this area, but overall there is a good evidence base for including these activities within Namaste Care for people living with advanced dementia

Sheep, beasts, and knights: fugitive alterity in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene book VI, and The Shepheardes Calender

This chapter reads “The Legend of Courtesie”, Book VI of Spenser’s unfinished romance alongside his anonymously published debut, The Shepheardes Calender (1579), a set of twelve pastoral eclogues. Book VI seemingly rests on a series of polarisations: human/animal; culture/nature; civilisation/savagery; and, less obviously, romance/pastoral. These dualisms lend themselves to the interests of animal studies but critics have not yet brought this framework to the Book. The first task of this chapter is to draw critical attention to the significance of Book VI’s animals, particularly its pastoral flocks of sheep and the terrifying monster that is the Blatant Beast. I initially argue that the animals support the Book’s conceptual and generic polarisations; in this respect, they perform a function that is continuous with the allegorical mode of the poem as a whole. However, Spenser does not rest on such easy distinctions. This becomes evident when we turn to Book VI’s destabilisation of its own categories via its other important animals: a bear and a tiger. Spenser insinuates into his representations an alterity and hybridity which resist taming and trapping. The significance of this resistance is that it is offered not only by the other animals, but by the humans too, occurring when they occupy momentary imaginative spaces, perform temporal moves, or swerves in signification. With these deft gestures, the poem reaches for a fugitive alterity