Group Music Therapy Methods in Cross-Cultural Aged Care Practice in Australia: A commentary on Ip & Grocke’s article

When I worked as a music therapist in a Danish nursing home ten years ago there were no residents with an ethnic or cultural background other than Danish. There were 24 residents at this geronto-psychiatric unit and all had lived their lives in Denmark, most of them in the local area. It was often told that Mrs F travelled a lot. She and her husband bought a sailing boat and sailed as far as to southern European countries. She was an exception. One of the other residents once visited Rome, and a few had travelled to neighbour countries such as Norway, Sweden and Germany. At another unit there was a man from Turkey, who did not speak Danish at all, but seemed to understand quite a lot, and then there was this woman from Austria, who had lived in Denmark since she married almost 50 years ago. She was referred to music therapy in my unit, because I knew German folk songs and spoke German.

This situation, with a nursing home population who mainly are rooted in the same local area, is very different from the situation described by Ip & Grocke’s article where an “ever-increasing diversity of ethnic, cultural and religious backgrounds” in elderly Australians is seen. It has changed in Denmark as well as in the other European countries in the last decade, though. Now ten percent of school children in Denmark have a mother tongue other than Danish, and a growing number of the aged population has a CALD-background (Culturally And Linguistically Diverse). One percent of the population in Denmark +60 years has a CALD-background, and this number is expected to increase with 50 percent (from 52.210 persons in 2008 to l78.406 in 2018) (Ny i Danmark 2008). It will last at least ten more years before this part of the aged population is expected to need residential care. So people with a CALD-background will only count for a smaller number in Danish nursing homes for the years to come.