Posted July 16, 2009
On a typical work day, Michele Erich wanders New Hanover Regional Medical Center’s halls, a guitar or pinwheel as her medicine bag.
Erich, the hospital’s music therapist and child life specialist, splits her days between the cancer center, the ICU and the pediatric floors.
She might use a kaleidoscope to distract a child getting an IV line put in. Later, she could be playing soft music by a bed to comfort a dying patient and their family. Other days, she strums the guitar to relax cancer patients getting chemotherapy treatments.
“It’s nice to be able to offer them something that’s pleasant and not another piece of bad news or something that hurts,” Erich said one recent afternoon at the Betty H. Cameron Women’s and Children’s Hospital.
Erich has been a music therapist for more than 20 years — the past 12 at New Hanover Regional. She became certified as a child life specialist in 2004.
Originally from Northern Pennsylvania, Erich moved to North Carolina in 1985 because of her parents.
She transferred to East Carolina University for the school’s music therapy program, completing an undergraduate degree and became the first to earn the program’s then-new master’s degree.
A music enthusiast — she plays the alto saxophone, xylophone and keyboard among other instruments — Erich wanted to find a way to translate playing into helping others.
“I had an interest in music, and I had an interest in working with people,” she said.
Erich started as a music therapist in schools and a nursing home. She also worked at a psychiatric hospital in Jacksonville.
When the opportunity to join New Hanover Regional came up, Erich thought it was a good fit and liked the working with a variety of patients.
There are more than 4,500 music therapists board certified like Erich through the Certification Board for Music Therapists.
Medicare has recognized music therapy as a reimbursable service since the mid-1990s as long as it is prescribed by a physician and part of a goal-driven plan to show improvement.
A growing number of private insurers also are covering the services, according to the American Music Therapy Association, which estimates at least 20 percent of music therapists receive reimbursement.
When Erich started in the field, it was not widely known.
“Now, a lot of people say, ‘I’ve heard of that,'” she said. “It’s exciting to see the growth.”
The child life specialist field also has grown in popularity in recent years. Nearly every children’s hospital in the United States now has a child life specialist or staff whose sole focus is to help children deal with being in the hospital.
The number of programs have doubled since 1965, and there are more than 400 in the United States and Canada, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.
The academy, in a policy statement about child life programs, pointed to one experimental evaluation of a program that showed the children there coped better during their hospital stay and were on initial pain-management narcotics for a shorter period and their length of stay in the hospital was slightly shorter.
But the pediatric academy also points out that more empirical data needs to be collected about the programs’ value and effectiveness, especially since there is an ongoing effort to justify them because of rising health-care costs.
“Child life services should be considered an essential component of quality pediatric health care and are integral to family-centered care and best-practice models of health care delivery for children,” the academy’s report recommended.
Child life specialists, with a background in child development, use a range of tactics from play to self-expression activities to education to ease some of the stress associated not only with being sick but adapting to the changes involved in spending time in a hospital room instead of home.
Sometimes that can be as simple as taking extra time to talk a pediatric patient through what’s about to happen to her or him.
“I give them the facts. I explain it to them in their language,” Erich said.
Other times, the child Erich helps isn’t a patient but a family member at the hospital. Child life specialists also work with families facing the death of a loved one.
“Taking a 6-year-old in to say goodbye to his mother is not the easiest thing to do,” she said.
Erich often combines her music and child life specialties, using instruments to get pediatric patients to open up or to distract them from the fact that they are in a hospital.
On a recent afternoon, 9-year-old Alan Westbrook sat in the hospital’s pediatric floor playroom, beating furiously on a tom-tom drum.
“Let’s see if you and I can come up with a good rhythm,” said Erich, holding a kid-sized djembe drum.
Beating on the instruments and scurrying from one piece to another, Alan looked like any normal kid.
Only the IV catheter taped to his hand gave away the fact that he was a patient and not in his school’s music class. Alan had to spend a couple of days at the hospital after an asthma attack.
“It’s got to be a plus,” his father, Gene, said about the child life program. “You know kids when they come here, they’re scared.”
“Being in the hospital’s not very enjoyable,” said Emily Martin, whose 4-year-old daughter Jordan was being treated overnight for dehydration. “This is really good. It seems like a great idea to keep the kids occupied.”
For Erich, moving around the hospital is part of her position’s draw because she enjoys working with patients of different ages.
“The work I do is very rewarding,” she said. “I think I learn something new every day.”
Vicky Eckenrode: 343-2339
On Twitter.com: @vickyeckenrode
Date: July 10, 2009
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Copyright © 2009, Star-News, Wilmington, N.C.
