Music Intervention on Palliative Patients

Palliative/hospice care patients experience many negative symptoms during their time in such facilities. These symptoms include, but are usually not limited to, pain, anxiety, depression, and so on. This study is interested in exploring how a music intervention can be used to reduce these symptoms in order to improve the quality of life for these patients. Specifically, because music interventions can be costly (e.g., employing music therapists and the likes of) and there is a lack of knowledge about how to properly implement music interventions, we believe that it would be most cost-effective as well as effective in reducing the described symptoms by introducing pre-recorded music as an intervention. Patients will be given pre-recorded music which requires less training and less money but may be just as effective as music interventions that do not use pre-recorded music. Patients will be evaluated by administering surveys at predetermined times to measure their symptoms, and interview-like questions will be administered at the end of the study to collect information that will be used to inform a larger study in the future. This study will, therefore, be collecting data on both how effective the intervention is and how feasible it is to use the same methods for a similar larger study in the future.