Family-Centered Music Therapy in Neonatal Pain Management as an Innovative Research Approach. A Mixed Methods Pilot Study

The aim of the study is to evaluate combined family-centered music therapy, skin-to-skin contact, and live parental singing, on:

1. the parents’ sense of competence during painful procedures on their preterm/newborn infant,

2. the meanings parents attribute to music therapy and parent-led interventions as non-pharmacological pain management,

3. the infants’ pain expressions assessed by the parent on the NIPS pain scale,

4. changes in parental stress levels assessed using self-report questionnaires,

5. parents’ subjective emotional experiences, measured with Visual Analogue Scale before and after each procedure.