Reablement by Stealth

Background

In Spring 2026 darts embarked on a three-month pilot project within three Adult Social Care (ASC) settings in Doncaster, including Positive Step Social Care Assessment Unit.

Positive Step provides short term accommodation for people requiring comprehensive assessment. Many people accessing Positive Step have just been released from hospital and staff support guests to build confidence and skills to enable them to return home or to move into more suitable care settings.

The service contributes to the hospital discharge pathway, helping to reduce hospital stays and prevent delayed discharge from acute beds. Its core purpose is to reduce or delay admissions to long-term care and prevent hospital readmissions by facilitating safe discharge with appropriate community and home support tailored to individual needs.

What we did

During the pilot project, musician Dyzelle spent time with the team at Positive Step to explore how creative activity could add to their existing programme of activities, as Dyzelle explains in her own words.

Over the past 2 months, I have been working closely with the activity co-ordinators to observe and support their activities and also lead some music workshops. During these workshops I met Barry* – a male guest in his nineties, who could be described as a Yorkshire lad through and through. The first time I met Barry, he instantly started quizzing me about classical music and opera, and shared his favourites with me, informing me that his favourite opera was ‘Carmen’ by Bizet as it was ‘a fiery one’.

Our warm-up that day was a movement activity with scarves and instruments to ‘Waltz of the Flowers’ by Tchaikovsky. On the surface, this looked to participants like a simple warm-up, but it was actually designed to encourage gross motor movement, co-ordination and cross-lateral movements – all actions that support reablement and that can be worked on by stealth when ‘hidden’ in meaningful creative activity.

Considering how sleepy the group seemed when I first entered, I had anticipated that people would choose to stay seated throughout. However, the activities seemed to ignite a new energy in the group and I started seeing more movement, people sharing ideas for new physical gestures and more social interactions, laughter and joy. Barry even surprised staff by standing up so he could have more space for making big, elaborate arm movements with the scarf.

The enjoyment was clear on his face, but he made sure to pull me aside afterwards to tell me that he was ‘glad his pals couldn’t see him’.

During a later visit, whilst doing a songwriting task focussing on our own stories of Doncaster,  Barry really came to life – he started offering up suggestions for lyrics and the staff shared that he was a published poet. I leaned into his expertise during the session and asked him for improvements for lyrics I had written. Barry took this role very seriously and seemed to relish this sense of purpose and his new identity within the group as ‘songwriter’.

Over the weeks that Barry was staying at Positive Step, he and I had chats after the sessions about poetry, his career, the local creative scene and about music and poetry in general. One week when I arrived, he informed me he had written a whole song in the week since I had seen him last and he was excited to share it with me. At the end of the group activity that day, Barry asked if he could ‘derail my session’ to get some audience participation on his new song and taught us the call and response lines he wanted us to respond with. He was in his element.

After that session, Barry asked the staff to fetch a printed collection of his poems. He asked me to read one of them out loud to him, but failed to mention that it was written in phonetic Yorkshire dialect – not something that comes naturally to me as a Scot. Barry took great glee in correcting my mistakes and teaching me some less common Yorkshire dialect. For Barry, the simple act of us identifying and celebrating his true identity as a creative, a writer and a poet meant a lot.

What’s next

Barry’s story shows how creativity can act as a powerful tool for reablement when it is embedded into the everyday routines and activities of a setting like Positive Step. Through music, movement and songwriting, creative activity provided opportunities to improve physical mobility, strengthen social connections and reinforce a sense of identity and purpose.

What may have appeared to be simple, fun activities were subtly supporting many of the core aims of Positive Step’s approach to reablement – enabling people to regain skills, confidence and independence following a hospital stay. By recognising Barry as a poet, songwriter and storyteller, Dyzelle and the staff at Positive Step helped unlock strengths that might otherwise have remained hidden.

The project highlights how creative activity, when embedded into services like Positive Step, can contribute to improved outcomes for people preparing to return home or move on to the next stage of their journey, and the learning from the project will help shape a future funding bid to scale this creative approach across the wider social care sector in Doncaster.

*Name has been changed.