Music Therapy For Premature Infants
Introduction
Over 25 years, many researches were done to explore the effectiveness of music therapy for premature infants (Standley, 2014). Before we explore the methods and benefits of music therapy, we will first look at the situation of this client population.
Premature infants are those babies who were born before 37 weeks of gestation. If babies were born before 27 weeks are extremely preterm infants. They are immediately brought to neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). Being placed in an incubator, surrounded by machines measuring heartbeat, oxygen, nutritional intake, and emergency alarm signals (Meadows, 2011). There is a great contrast between the chaotic environment of the hospital and the safety
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There are many researches done to explore how music intervention affect the vital signs of preterm infants. Over 50 research studies have provided different types of evidence-based NICU-MT methods and recorded many benefits for them (Standley, 2014). It is worth to investigate the effectiveness of music intervention for improving the growth and lives of these infants.
To learn more on this, I have chosen three journal articles. Each talks about different methodologies, include family-centred music therapy (Ettenberger, 2017), live music application (Loewy, Stewart, AnDassler, Telsey and Homel, 2013) and music intervention in different developmental stages (Standley, 2014). Supplementary information can be found from these articles, which can be compared with our course text.
Comprehensive summary of the articles
“Music therapy in the neonatal intensive care unit: Putting the families at the centre of care”, is about family centred approach. The author first listed the factors affecting parent-infant relationship. For babies, chaotic sound environment of the NICU cause behavioural disorganization, sleep interruption and might impaired auditory development (Ettenberger, 2017). For parents, they might experience anxiety, increased levels of stress and depressive symptoms during and after their baby’s hospitalization (Ettenberger,