'Not just role play': rethinking dementia care training

As director of her own theatre company performing interactive and immersive experiences, Laura Hawley has built a successful career as a drama teacher and acting coach, examiner and practitioner.

“We performed for a range of audiences including those living with dementia in care homes and people with mental illness. The way those audiences interacted with us interested me,” she says.

“I started to think about how drama and health care go together and how drama techniques can complement nursing; I decided to retrain and completed my master’s degree in mental health nursing in 2021.”

While completing her degree, Laura spent her placements on dementia wards. “I realised many of the techniques I’d used in drama were useful in nursing, particularly for dementia patients. For example, how you use your voice, your tone, and your body. I started to think about how acting skills could help train nursing staff to provide more person-centred care.”

Nurse rehearsal

Moving into nurse lecturing and currently completing a PhD in nursing and drama, Laura’s combining the two worlds to create innovative learning experiences that challenge traditional approaches to nurse education.

In collaboration with the University of Huddersfield’s Health and Wellbeing Academy, Laura’s created a series of workshops in applied drama techniques and actor training specifically for nursing students.

Laura’s quick to point out her workshops are not about role play.

“Role play scenarios do happen in nursing training and simulated exams, but this isn’t what I’m teaching,” she says.

“When I tell people what I do, they think they know all about it because they know about role play. But this is about creating examples of lived experience by using specific acting techniques to build trust, connection and empathy.”

Supporting patients

In her sessions, students practise scenarios they’re likely to encounter in dementia care: difficult conversations, moments of confusion, or situations where non‑verbal communication matters as much as words. Drama‑based techniques help them slow down, observe, and respond appropriately.

“So much of dementia care training is ad-hoc. Teaching how to empathise and communicate with people living with dementia is painfully inadequate,” says Laura. “By using these techniques, we can train nursing staff in what really supports our patients.”

Students feel confident in their ability to understand themselves

Each session explores practical and creative approaches to dementia education, including breathwork and image theatre – a drama technique that focuses on physicality – all designed to help nurses connect more effectively with the people they care for.

Some students might feel apprehensive at first, but quickly start to understand how practical exercises can support care.

“They realise through the techniques that communication isn’t just about what you say,” Laura says. “It’s how you stand, how you speak, your expressions, how you can build trust without speaking – all things actors train in.”

In practice

Students often think they already know how to communicate effectively. But once they try techniques borrowed from acting and theatre practitioners including Stanislavski or Augusto Boal – simplified, adapted, and made practical – something clicks. They understand how their own memories, confidence levels, cultural background and body language shape every interaction.

Laura says: “When students first do one of the workshops, it all feels very new, but by the end of each session they feel confident in their ability to understand themselves. This matters as it opens a new idea as to what effective communication is – and it’s powerful.”

These techniques can create better care

“We talk about empathy, but we can never truly put ourselves in someone else’s shoes,” explains Laura. “What we can do is be fully with them, in that moment, a term called sympathetic presence.”

This term was developed by Health Action Training, a company Laura works with, teaching these techniques internationally across nursing.

Working closely with nursing students, Laura helps them to rethink what communication in dementia care can look like.

“There’s a self-awareness; your own styles, how you come across and how you speak. Just knowing the impact of how you’re feeling in any moment, your own experience and memories, are all going to be there in your physical expression. These are all considerations in how we communicate with others.”

Community work

Laura’s hoping her work will change how nurse education is delivered.

“These exercises can create better care,” she says. “The plan is to make these workshops a standalone module in the nursing degree course.”

Laura’s work has reached beyond Huddersfield, too. She’s delivered workshops at the University of Chichester and the University of Portsmouth, as well as collaborating with the University of Tampere in Finland.

Understanding the individual is so important

Students have also been working on their communication skills during placements with Gwennie’s in Huddersfield, a local dementia charity that runs a memory cafe. This provides a safe social space for people living with dementia and allows them or their families to meet with health professionals.

“We’ve been involved in these sessions at the cafe since the start of this project,” says Laura. “It gives students the chance to apply what they’re learning in the classroom and really start to embed those practical techniques.”

The placements combined with the workshops equip nursing students with deeper understanding and effective communication skills when working specifically in dementia care settings. Plans are now in place to develop a specialist dementia placement for Huddersfield nursing students to incorporate this training.

“These skills highlight how powerful our physical expressions can be and what communication and person-centred care really is, particularly in dementia care where understanding the individual is so important,” Laura concludes.