Your bedding can help you avoid tears while waiting for emergency surgery.
Few things will get your goat like having to wait for emergency surgery.
Many of us have been there. It’s late at night, you’re tired, you drive home, wrap your car around a tree and before you know it, you’re at the tail end of a bunch of ambulances snaking their way into the ED. [Dark … am I overworking you? – Ed.]
That broken arm and face lacerations are giving you a lot of grief, the painkillers just aren’t cutting it and the ambos have gone for a smoke so you can’t ask for an industrial grade dose of whatever analgesic was on the menu.
This is where you could use a spot of help from Danish nurse Lisa Antonsen from Odense University Hospital’s Department of Emergency Medicine.
Ms Antonsen told the European Emergency Medicine Congress in Berlin earlier today she had found a statistically significant association between listening to music and patients’ reports of reduced pain and improved relaxation and wellbeing.
Patients waiting in ED for urgent surgery were less anxious, more relaxed and experienced less pain if they were given a special music pillow to rest on, she said.
Ms Antonsen invited all patients waiting for urgent surgery in the ED to take part in the study and she enrolled 14 men and 16 women aged between 18 and 93. The patients were experiencing a whole gamut of health emergencies such as appendicitis, intestinal obstruction, abscess or inflammation of the gall bladder.
She offered them the music pillow for 30 minutes during the waiting time. The nifty device include a speaker with an MP3 player plugged into it and was designed to play specially composed music.
Before and after using the pillow, Ms Antonsen asked patients to rate their pain, relaxation and wellbeing on a visual scale ranging from 0 to 10. After listening to music, 15 patients were interviewed about the experience and their answers contributed to the qualitative part of the study.
“We found that while using the music pillow, the patients experienced a decrease in pain from an average score of 4.8 to 3.7,” she said. “Their relaxation improved from an average of 4.6 to 7.6, and their feeling of general well-being increased from an average score of 4.3 to 6.6.”
The Back Page will be watching next week’s federal Budget for a pillow allocation in the health budget.
