Perioperative Music Listening on Anxiety, Analgesia Use and Patient Satisfaction

Overview

The capacity of music to relieve pain has been used in many forms of medicines and has been proven to reduce anxiety, pain and need for analgesia in perioperative setting. However, music listening as an inexpensive and duplicable method has not been studied in the local context. The investigators hereby propose a prospective study to recruit women who undergo surgery to evaluate the effectiveness of music in pain relief and post-operative recovery in KKH; as well as the possibility of implementing music listening in perioperative setting. The patients will be offered to listen to one out of several pre-determined lists of music of different genres before, and after surgery. Data including pain score, Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) score, EuroQol-Five Dimensions questionnaire-using Three Levels (EQ-5D-3L), vital signs, analgesia usage and patient satisfaction will be collected in the perioperative period. The collected data shall also be assessed if they are affected by the presence of music, duration of music listening, and the genre chosen by the patients. The investigators believe that this study could help determine the clinical relevance of music for pain relief in local setting, which potentially could reduce patient pain and anxiety caused by surgery. This in turn could allow music listening to be adopted as a non-invasive pain relief intervention in local healthcare settings and further improve patient outcome with lower cost and greater convenience as well as safety.

Some tissue injury is unavoidable during surgery, but pain and anxiety are (nearly as often) also unavoidable in the perioperative period. Acute post-operative pain and anxiety have been managed via pharmacological interventions such as opioid-based analgesia for over a century. However, non-pharmacological interventions - such as music - have also been shown to safe and cost-effective, to improve the overall patient experience, and improve outcomes across a variety of surgical settings. Music has been shown to decrease pain in the perioperative period, to reduce plasma, urine, and salivary cortisol levels, modulate the inflammatory response (natural killer lymphocytes), blood pressure, and heart rate.Additionally, anxiety scores and pain scores (measured using the visual analog scale (VAS)) have shown statistically significant reductions in the perioperative period, when music therapy was available. From 1 April 2015 to 31 March 2016, there were 31,871 surgeries done in KK Women's and Children's Hospital (KKH). While music therapy in the hospital has been offered as a part of cognitive rehabilitation services or end of life care, there is little investigation found on its effect if used perioperatively in adult patients who undergo surgeries, especially in local setting. Based on the above rationale, the investigators shall therefore investigate the feasibility and practicability of deploying music listening in pain management in KKH, and further determine the nature of the music (duration, genre) by fitting the local context in order to improve the patient outcome in perioperative settings.