Music therapy community engaged practice and research: a team approach

This project works closely with four different communities across Ireland to explore how music therapy can support people’s health and wellbeing. In each community, MA Music Therapy students visit weekly as part of their clinical training, learning directly from community partners who supervise their placements. Alongside them, PhD researchers work over several years with these partners to create research with them. Across the four locations, the projects focus on different needs: 

Croom Hospital: Miriam Cano Esteller is studying whether music therapy can reduce pain and distress during minor surgical procedures, while Dr Katie Fitzpatrick supervises PhD and MA researchers and delivers the only music therapy service in a pain clinic in Ireland. 

Corpus Christi School: Sarah Alley offers a wide range of music therapy supports, from community choirs to family sessions, while carrying out a three‑year study on how music can help children dealing with trauma. 

Cork: Hannah Healy delivered a music therapy pilot for children experiencing grief, in collaboration with parents and local schools and is completing PhD research in this emerging field 

National Rehabilitation Hospital: James Burns’ PhD examined how music therapy can aid language recovery for children with brain injuries. His work was carried out with speech and language therapists as part of an ongoing collaboration between UL and the hospital’s Creative Arts Therapy team. 

In all settings, there is delivery of music therapy to people to support their health and wellbeing but also rigorous research projects which are internationally unique. These projects are all offering (1) an essential music therapy service, designed and requested by community partners (2) key teaching and learning for UL students and (3) internationally significant research programmes.

Corpus Christi School, Moyross; Croom Hospital UHL; National Rehabilitation Hospital, Dublin and Dillons Cross Project, Cork. 

We’ve received positive feedback from community partners and participants. Reflection and evaluation with project partners is built into every stage of these projects, with regular feedback sessions with key partners.  

In all four settings we have conducted in-depth consultation with partners with lived experience and professional project partners (for example, teachers, principal at school; speech and language and physiotherapy colleagues at National Rehabilitation Hospital, people living with chronic pain and the pain team at Croom Hospital). In every project the services and interventions have only been introduced after careful consultation using a PPI framework, whereby the project is designed, delivered and evaluated by, and with, experts by experience and project partners in the community. Many of these evaluations have been published and presented. For example, peer reviewed research on the benefit of the work at National Rehabilitation Hospital and Croom Hospital is published in leading journals. Corpus Christi School reports and presentations report regularly on parent, student and staff evaluations and positive feedback. An artistic response (song cycle) has been created as part of the evaluation of the Cork grief project, along with research evaluating the benefit and producing recommendations for working with children with grief using the arts.