Music During Labor Epidural Placement and Patient Satisfaction

Patient satisfaction is becoming increasingly important to hospital administrators as a metric for quality of patient care services because it is now being linked to reimbursements (Maher 2015). Patient satisfaction is a complex problem, and may be affected by a variety of factors. A recent study found that higher patient satisfaction was associated with patients who received music therapy during their hospital stay (Mandel 2014). Given that music may positively affect patient satisfaction, we are designing a study to examine the effects of patient-preferred music on patient satisfaction in women undergoing labor epidural placement.