July 25, 2021
After researching our chosen topic (the use of music therapy in mechanically ventilated patients) it became clear to us that this technique, while maybe not widely implemented, is effective and useful in the clinical setting. From the start, just based on a quick overview of our articles, we knew that music therapy was understood to be helpful in creating a healing environment. However, I didn’t realize the extent to which it was useful in shortening hospital stays, preventing agitation, and decreasing the number of days on a ventilator. Additionally, our articles pointed out that music therapy as a treatment is cost-effective, requires minimal resources, and does not require additional training for staff.
That being said, I can confidently say that I will implement music therapy into my future nursing practice. At no point in any of our articles were any adverse effects listed, which is a promising finding. Considering that it does no additional harm, and actually reduces anxiety for patients at no additional cost, I would use it for as many patients as possible.
I think the only point of disagreement my groupmates and I had about the findings was how we might tweak our PICOT question. Some of the research articles we found talked about ICU patients specifically, others talked about conscious versus unconscious patients, and we went back and forth for a bit about how specific our patient population should be.
During the writing process, the only challenge we faced as a group was blending our writing styles in our paper, which worked out nicely once we revised the paper as a group.
