Music Therapy Postoperatively for Pain Control

Running head: EVIDENCE BASED PRACTICE
EVIDENCE BASED PRACTICE
Name of the University
Author Note

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EVIDENCE BASED PRACTICE
Music Therapy Postoperatively for Pain Control
Introduction
The growing needs of the health care consumers and the complexity of the health care
issue are prompting the nurses to push their limits beyond their conventional nursing practice.
Nowadays, the nurses have to work in frontline with the doctors and multidisciplinary teams,
handling critical cases (Straus et al., 2013). This calls for more research. Remaining updated
to the recent works enhances the clinical reasoning and the critical thinking among the nurses
providing the nurses with the opportunities to provide an individualized care.
This paper focuses on the intervention- music therapy to control pain in the post-
operative period. Pain is an unavoidable factor following a surgery. Using pharmacological
intervention to treat post-operative pain arises several adverse effects like adverse drug
reactions and the other physiological side effects. Studies have shown that listening to music
can decrease pain and anxiety in the postoperative period. Hence, this paper would validate
the effectiveness of the pain therapy by developing a clinical question, PICO and all the steps
in an EBP practice.
EBP process
Clinical question:
Does music therapy helps in alleviating pain in elderly patient, in the post-operative period in
comparison to other pharmacological interventions?

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EVIDENCE BASED PRACTICE
A clinical question should be directly relevant to the patient and the challenge at hand.
The clinical question should be phrased in a way facilitating the search for the answer. The
framework helps in organizing and focusing on the foreground question in to a query that is
searchable. While developing a PICO, it is necessary to assess what type of question are we
asking (diagnosis, therapy, prognosis, prevention or etiology) (Riva et al., 2017).
After the formation of the PICO question, the next step involves searching of the
evidence-based research articles. The evidence-based hierarchy allows to adopt a top down
approach to locate the best evidence, when the initial literary search is being conducted. The
study types in the EBP hierarchy is based on the strength and the precision of the research
methods (Clarke et al., 2013). Different types of the hierarchies exists for different types of
clinical questions. The topmost level of the EBP hierarchy consists of systematic reviews
and the meta-analysis followed by critically appraised topics (level 2), followed by the
critically appraised individual articles (level 3). Randomized control trials being at the level
4, followed by cohort studies at level 5, case-controlled studies at level 6 and ideas, editorials,
opinions and anecdotal records at the base of the pyramid (Clarke et al., 2013).
PICO table
P(Population) Geriatric patient who had undergone a surgery
I(Intervention) Music therapy
C(Comparison
)
Elderly patients receiving pharmacological intervention.
O (Outcome) Reduction of pain