The Bonny Method of Guided Imagery and Music (BMGIM) for Caring of Oncology Patients: A Systematic Mixed Studies Review

Introduction: The best available research evidence is required to support health care decisions.  Evidence based practice implies that the health care decisions and practices are based on knowledge, which is acquired from research evidence.  In order to identify research evidence and best practices to support the implementation of BMGIM in cancer care a systematic review was conducted.  As the systematic review included studies of quantitative,  qualitative and mixed methodologies, a Systematic Mixed Studies Review was conducted.

The objective was to conduct a systematic review to compare the effectiveness of BMGIM to other methods of care on the physical, psychological and spiritual wellbeing of oncology patients.

Research questions which guided the systematic review:

1.   What is the effect of BMGIM compared to other methods of care on the physical, psychological and spiritual wellbeing of adult oncology patients? 

2.   What are the experiences of adult cancer patients receiving BMGIM?

Method: The Cochrane library, PUBMED, Mosby's nursing consult, CINAHL,  Clinical key, Health & Wellness Resource Centre, PsychINFO,  MEDLINE (OVID & ProQuest), Science Direct, EBSCO,  Scopus,  ProQuest,  Google Scholar, Nordic Journal of Music Therapy, Journal of  Music Therapy,  Aalborg University,  ClinicalTrials.com, Voices.com and Melbourne conservatory of music databases/search engines, journals and websites were searched.  Diverse research design studies within the time frame of 2002 to 2014 were considered.  Two reviewers conducted the process.

Results: 10 141 studies were identified of which 9914 were excluded during the screening of the study titles. After the exclusion of duplicates, the abstracts of 130 studies were screened for relevance.  Thereafter 29 studies proceeded to stage 2, where the full text was retrieved.  Upon the review of the 29 full text studies, 23 studies were excluded.  Six records proceeded to data extraction.

Discussion:  A process of inductive qualitative thematic data analysis guided the data extraction and analysis.   Studies found significantly lower anxiety scores at follow up as well as improved quality of life scores at follow up in participants who received BMGIM.   The qualitative study findings included detailed descriptions of participants' experiences and a grounded theory on the influence of music and imagery was developed.

Keywords: 'Bonny', 'Bonny Method of Guided Imagery and Music', 'Bonny method', and 'BMGIM'