The Foundation, Nexe, and Germans Trias Hospital bring music therapy to clinical practice

With this goal in mind, and thanks to an agreement between the Ferrer-Salat Music Foundation, the Nexe Foundation, and the Germans Trias Hospital (Barcelona), a Music Therapy Unit has been set up in this center, specifically engaging with the hospital’s Neonatal Unit.

The Unit is interdisciplinary in nature and made up of clinical professionals and professional music therapists, being a pioneer in Spain since it is integrated within the medical team itself. Its goal is to improve the quality of care for patients, family members, professionals, and anyone who is in contact with the healthcare environment, regardless of their context or health condition, and to promote scientific research.

Its driving force has been pediatrician Pablo González, who has laid the foundations of the project and the Unit with the help of the Nexe Foundation’s team of music therapists. Currently, the program is being carried out in two sessions each week, individually for each child (right now, 30 babies) and family members who require it, always according to the instructions and in coordination with the medical team in charge.

González is not alone in carrying out these tasks, which are planned to be extended to the pediatric ward as well as to gynecology, obstetrics, and prenatal services. He works in close collaboration with Mercè Redorta, a music therapist from the Nexe Foundation, an organization with more than 40 years of experience in working with children with multiple disabilities, which has already used music therapy to improve the quality of life of children and their families. Mercè plays a key role in the project and her involvement is possible thanks to the agreement that the Nexe Foundation has reached with the Ferrer-Salat Music Foundation. Since 2016, the Foundation provides the necessary patronage to include this discipline in the daily life of children, also supplying qualified professionals, music classrooms and a bank of musical instruments.

Mercè has been trained in a pioneering methodology of music therapy intervention with newborns, developed by Dr. Jayne Standley at Florida State University, which will be implemented for the first time in Europe as part of this project.

Benefits for newborns and their families

The use of music therapy in the Neonatal ICU has been well-researched and documented, and has led to significant improvements in the following clinical parameters:

• Weight increase
• Reduction of hospitalization days
• Improved oxygen saturation levels
• Stabilization of cardiovascular function
• Preventing tactile, auditory, and vestibular hypersensitivity and avoiding overstimulation

According to Pablo Gonzalez: “Several studies support the beneficial effects of music. From the point of view of neuroscience, its potential as an impulse capable of stimulating all areas of the brain is clear: motor, personality, those that have to do with the processing of emotions and language, etc. It is a powerful tool for rehabilitation, early stimulation and neurodevelopment enhancement”.

Music therapy also helps to alleviate parental stress, allowing the emotional bond between children and parents and/or accompanying family members to strengthen, while also contributing to humanize the environment. This is particularly relevant for patients that are hospitalized for a long period of time due to prematurity or illness, undergoing aggressive treatments and connected to devices.

González emphasizes that “we try to promote communication and knowledge and to strengthen the bond between the family members and the newborn. We want to create an atmosphere that allows them to interact, so that they can forget they are in a hospital, surrounded by machines and alarms, and encourage them to be in a safe space where they can interact and get to know each other”.

Meanwhile, Mercè Redorta, Nexe Foundation’s music therapist, explains that the intervention often helps parents to alleviate the emotional shock of seeing their children hospitalized, as well as the feeling of guilt and of being constantly in danger: “Some sing or get emotional, look at each other or at the newborn as he or she reacts to a stimulus with a look of discovery, forgetting the anguish of the moments they are experiencing for a while”.

Measuring the benefits

An important part of the Unit’s research project is also focused on collecting data to verify the results of incorporating music therapy into the hospital’s multidisciplinary work, highlighting the benefits for both patients and families, measuring the impact on the health of patients and on the parent-child bond, analyzing, among other information, whether the parent’s levels of stress and anxiety related to the newborn’s hospitalization are reduced. The results of this project, which is currently at a very early stage, will be compared as the Unit’s intervention progresses in the coming months and in the project’s different stages.

Media coverage: La Vanguardia.