Palliative Care – Part 2
It was indicated that, other studies should be aware of palliative care’s incorporation of all perspectives which include: psychological, social, physical, existential and spiritual. Surprisingly all the studies discussed in this paper that relate to spirituality notas musicales used at least one concept of what Johnson et al. (2006) discussed mentioned in his research the negative part is that none of the studies focused on all the aspects that he mentioned.
Kernoham et al. (2006) discovered that spiritual issues which required support was rated as important to the participants’ lives and was psychological and social in nature, this information is supported in Johnson et al. (2006) background information. In Kernoham et al. (2006) study, spirituality was perceived to be a broad concept that was expressed both humanistically and religiously. 82% of the people in the study who received chaplaincy services felt that their spiritual needs were addressed and they had positive feedback on the services received. In the study only 28 out of 49 people remembered ever receiving the chaplaincy information leaflet while the chaplain identified the spiritual needs of only 44 participants as being met, rather than the actual number of 52 patients. These inconsistencies rooted to the limitations. Unlike Kernoham et al. (2006) study which focused on spirituality, Wlodarczyk (2007) focused on spirituality and music. The study posed that music therapy interventions such as songwriting, music-guided life review and providing opportunity for worship resulted in spiritual exploration and support. In Wlodarczyk study it was noted that the participants, requested for spiritual music in 75% of the music visits, and they preferred this to the discussion of spirituality without music. Spirituality issues were discussed 35% of the music visits as opposed to 15% of the non-music visits. In the case of Wlodarczyk (2007) spiritual music had a great impact on spirituality itself because the patients were actually more than likely to express themselves spiritually in the presence of music thus indicating that music helped stimulate peoples’ thoughts about certain issues. This may answer the question of inconsistencies addressed by Kernoham et al. (2006) study that revealed that only 28 out of 49 people remembered ever receiving the chaplaincy information leaflet. If these patients had experienced spiritual music rather than the information provided to them, they would have, more than likely been able to remember the spiritual information associated with the information leaflet. Overall, most patients in Kernoham et al. (2006) study viewed spiritual care to be essential to healthcare despite the inconsistencies that were reported.
The purpose of music in the research done by Evans (2002) was to determine whether music would help reduce anxiety and pain, minimize physiological consequences of pain in unpleasant procedures and situations or increase satisfaction with care. Evans (2002) target was the patients themselves. In contrast O’Kelly and Koffman (2007), aimed to explore the role of music therapy within multidisplinary palliative care teams and to guide both service providers and music therapist on the future integration of music therapy in palliative care. The questions and prompts used in the interview focused on the previous experiences of the participants who were music therapists from five United Kingdom (UK) hospices. The main focus was their music therapy work, their perception of the scope of music therapy in palliative care, and on the factors that they thought contributed to supporting or inhibiting the integration of music therapy within different disciplines involved palliative care.
While O’ Kelly et al. (2007) study was directed to the multidisplinary palliative care teams’ perspectives, Evans (2002) reviewed all the evidence- based materials from a patients’ perspective. These studies proved to be very important because O’ Kelly et al. (2007) found out that music therapy was very valuable to most interviewees. Unfortunately, the role of the music therapy was not understood among nurses. The study further discovered that music therapy had an impact on ones physical, emotional, social, environmental, creative, and spiritual health when provided with other disciplines also supporting Johnson et al. background information. Evans (2002) on the other hand, discovered that Music used in patients during hospitalization showed a reduction of anxiety and an improvement on mood during normal care delivery. Music however, had no impact on those receiving invasive or unpleasant procedures nor did it have an impact on their heart rate. There was also limited evidence that supported the use of music to reduce the need for sedation and analgesia during procedures.
The main limitation that was focused in the studies done by Evans (2002) and O’Kelly et al. (2007) was that they both provided partial insights into music therapy and they recommended follow-up studies to make sure that their studies became more valid. Since music therapy was not understood by many nurses in O’ Kelly et al.(2007) study, this could explain the reason why many patients did not observe any impact on the study done by Evans (2002) because they had never been exposed to music therapeutically as a means of coping with their symptoms in a hospital setting.
