An Investigation of Appropriateness of Nursing Referrals to Music Therapy and The Effect of Education on Such Referrals
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Author
Meadows, Leslie
Date
2004
Degree
Master of Arts in Music Therapy
Abstract
This investigation had two purposes: to determine if (a)
nurses in a hospital setting make appropriate referrals to
music therapy, and (b) whether one music therapy in-service
would increase the number of appropriate music therapy
referrals by nurses. This study utilized a pretest/posttest
design and incorporated a survey. Referrals from the
nursing department were tracked before and after the
survey/in-service process to determine efficacy of
educational procedure on the appropriateness of referrals.
The survey, which was a study-specific tool, was designed
to extract information from 158 nurses about their
knowledge of music therapy and its goals in a medical
setting. Nurses then received an in-service designed to
inform them of the differences between music therapy and
music medicine and to instruct them about the goals music
therapists address in intensive care, oncology and general
medical/surgical areas of the hospital. While the quantity of referrals increased post-in-service, and the proportion
of appropriate referrals post-in-service is larger (.535 >
.515), the Minitab analysis confirmed that there is not
enough evidence to support the claim that there is a
statistically significant increase (at the alpha = 0.05) in
appropriate referrals after the in-service. Additional
relevant information extracted from the data includes the
idea that nurses who utilize music themselves for patient
care also refer to the music therapy department more often
(R=0.378, P-value=0.000). It was found that intensive care
nurses are the most likely to use music occasionally or
often with their patients (88.57%), followed by oncology
nurses (62.16%) and general medical/surgical RNs (52.32%).