The paper attached examines the relationship between music therapy and stress levels in mechanically ventilated patients in the ICU. By forming an accurate and applicable PICOT question, we were able to streamline our research and gather pertinent data points to formulate our paper. The knowledge gleaned from our Evidence Based Practice course also guided our efforts in piecing together an efficacious research process.
Category: Research
Evan Carrell
EBP Final Reflection
August 1, 2021
This project was valuable in many ways. Working in a team is always a challenge, as combining multiple writing styles and preferences into one paper requires adjustments. In my future nursing practice, I will inevitably encounter situations where I will need to collaborate with colleagues who I disagree or clash with. Additionally, this foundational experience allowed me to practice finding appropriate research articles that fit well with the group’s PICOT question. The ability to find evidence to back up a research question will certainly be something I’m faced with in the clinical setting. In order to successfully write this paper, I had to pull outcomes from multiple different clinical trials and evaluate them based on their relevance, variables and reproducibility. Being able to pick out the strengths and weaknesses of a clinical trial is a very valuable skill to have, as doing so is vital in the process of eliminating redundancy, while increasing search efficiency.
In the instance of the research into our topic specifically, I learned a lot about the benefits of music therapy. None of the studies we found cited any observable disadvantages or adverse effects associated with this intervention. The results from these studies showed me the benefits of implementing music therapy hospital wide. I can say for certain that in my future practice, I will utilize music therapy in the treatment of my patients.
As far as my individual team contribution, I learned that I work best with structure, and laying out a clear outline of what my work will look like helps me organize my thoughts. Luckily, my teammates operate similarly, and our work came together fairly smoothly
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.
