Music Listening in Acute Hospital Settings

Introducing music listening into a hospital setting is a careful and closely monitored process. Patients in hospitals are often in life threatening situations and therefore safety is a primary concern. The current best practice model for ensuring adequate safety is the evidence-based approach—a paradigm that became prominent in the 1990s in response to the recognition that many people within the medical system were relying on what they had learned in their training and not updating their practices to incorporate newly emerging findings. Archie Cochrane (Claridge and Fabian 2005; Cochrane 1972) in the UK, and David Sackett in Canada (Sackett et al. 1996; Sackett and Rosenberg 1995) were key proponents and largely credited with the recommendation that clinicians should be conscientious and judicious in their reading of the best evidence from research in the management of individual patients. Technology has had a large influence on the ability of clinicians to stay up to date with the latest research (Claridge and Fabian 2005) and with these recommendations and possibilities has come a requirement to have rigorous evidence of treatment efficacy before it is introduced into hospital settings.