Essay - Does Music Therapy Helps Perioperative Patients

Running head: ESSAY
Critical appraisal
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

ESSAY1
Introduction- Perioperative care generally refers to the care delivered to patients, prior
to and following a surgery. It generally takes places in hospitals or surgical centres
(Gustafsson et al., 2019). This area of practice has been selected owing to the fact that
regardless of the enhanced understanding of the mechanism of anxiety and administration of
antianxiety drugs, perioperative anxiety is commonly undertreated. Music therapy has been
found to promote relaxation by mimicking the heart during resting stage (Ogba et al., 2019).
The article had been selected from the electronic database of CINAHL by using search terms
like ‘music therapy’, ‘perioperative’, ‘anxiety’, and ‘management’ that were combined using
boolean operators ‘AND’ and ‘OR’ (McGowan et al., 2016). Randomised controlled trials
published on or after 2009 were considered eligible. The PICO format was used for
developing the foreground research question and the table given below highlights the
different PICO components:
P (population) Perioperative patients
I (intervention) Music therapy
C (comparison) Usual care
O (outcome) Reduced anxiety
Table 1- PICO format
The research question that helped in article selection was: ‘Does music therapy helps
to alleviate anxiety for perioperative patients?’ This assignment will contain a critical
appraisal of an article titled ‘Relaxing music as pre-medication before surgery: a randomised
controlled trial’ that was found relevant to the question given above, based on the Joanna
Briggs Institute (JBI) checklist for RCTs since it is a world-wide, membership founded
research and development association.

ESSAY2
1. Randomisation- Yes. Presence of variations between research participants allocated
to different comparison groups acts as a major risk to the internal validity. Randomisation
refers to assigning participants to a clinical trial group such that all participants have identical
chance of getting allocated to either control or treatment group (Treweek et al., 2018).
Therefore, successful randomisation necessitates that the assignment to groups cannot be
anticipated in advance. The researchers randomised 372 patients who were scheduled for
elective surgery to two groups namely, music therapy (treatment) and 0.05–0.1 mg/kg of oral
midazolam (comparison) (Bringman et al., 2009). This process eliminated bias in assignment
of participants to treatment group and also facilitated direct comparison of one treatment to
another, thereby establishing superiority of one (Creswell & Creswell, 2017). Though the
envelope is opened only after a patient has agreed to participate in the trial, the procedure is
subject to deliberate meddling since the researchers can open some envelopes, following
which they can assign patients to the anticipated treatment (Barr et al., 2017).
2. Concealment of allocation- Yes. It generally comprises of processes that avert the
investigators allocating the patients from understanding before apportionment, which control
or treatment is next in the assignment procedure. If the investigators are aware of the groups
where the participants are assigned, there remains a risk of purposeful and deliberate
intrusion, thereby distorting the results (Clark, Fairhurst & Torgerson, 2016). The use of
sealed envelope suggests that the allocation sequence was concealed from the researchers
until the moment of assigning the 372 patients to the two groups that have been mentioned
above. Therefore, this step prevented the researchers from instinctively or otherwise
governing which patients will be allocated to the control or the intervention group, thus
increasing reliability of the results (Bringman et al., 2009).
3. Baseline characteristics- Yes. According to Baldwin (2018) internal validity in a
research refers to the estimated truth about inferences, in relation to causal effect. Presence of