The impact that live music has within the healthcare environment brings invaluable benefits to all: patients, visitors and staff.
These are demanding settings, requiring musicians to be particularly sensitive to the prevailing mood on the ward and adapt their performance accordingly, often as the performance progresses. Because their approach to performance is so flexible, LMN musicians are ideally suited to such work, whether performing at a patient's bedside, in the common room of a day hospice or for children and parents on a children's ward. Recently one of our young guitarists delivered 40 one-to-one sessions for a young man in a coma with remarkable results.
The use of music in healthcare settings is increasingly gaining recognition amongst health practitioners, clinicians, policy makers and administrators as a valuable tool in reducing pain, decreasing anxiety, and increasing relaxation. A wealth of research, which is added to regularly from within the Arts and Health sector, points to the use of music as an effective intervention to distract patients from distressing situations, empowering them with the ability to heal from within. Music can also have a beneficial effect on hard-working and pressurised staff. LMN's projects within healthcare settings provide evidence in support of the findings of the following reports;
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The King's Fund Enhancing the Healing Environment Programme |
The humanising of the hospital environment. |
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A study of the effects of visual & performing arts in healthcare Staricoff, Duncan & Wright, Chelsea and Westminster Hospital
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Patients in the Day Surgery Unit who were exposed to visual arts and live music during the preoperative period required significantly less induction agents to induce anaesthesia. |
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An ongoing clinical trial led by Gottfried Schlaug, a neurology professor at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School in Boston, US has shown how the brain responds to "melodic intonation therapy". |
Teaching stroke patients to sing "rewires" their brains, helping them recover their speech, say scientists. By singing, patients use a different area of the brain from the area involved in speech. |
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Live music has positive effects on hospitalised premature babies, Dr. Shmuel Arnon, Meir General Hospital, Israel |
Live music was associated with significantly deeper sleep and reduced heart rate during the thirty minutes following the music, improving physiological responses and growth of pre-term infants. Infants in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit are often subjected to noise levels which cause concern but the special properties of the music can provide benefits and a solution to the noise. |
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A study of the effects of visual & performing arts in healthcare (Staricoff, Duncan & Wright) Chelsea and Wesminster Hospital |
Live music performed in the waiting area of the Antenatal High Risk Clinic was effective in lowering the blood pressure of patients waiting for their appointments. |
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It's fantastic, beautiful: definitely should be on every ward… all day! Doctor |