Effects of Voice Records on Vital Signs, Pain and Serum Cortisol Levels in Surgical Intensive Care Unit: Randomized-controlled Study

The condition of having surgery, the severity of the disease, being admitted to the intensive care unit in the postoperative period and the presence of many invasive interventions in the body, intense feelings of pain and fear, loss of autonomy, helplessness, and fear of death create a heavy physical, psychological and emotional burden on patients undergoing surgery. All these factors increase the stress level in the patient by causing many metabolic and hormonal changes, and as a result of this stress response, negative conditions such as hyperglycaemia, delay in recovery, and decreased immunity can be seen.

Nurses have main roles and responsibilities in intensive care settings such as caring for patients, participating in treatment, informing and counselling patients and their relatives. Within the scope of these roles and responsibilities, nurses should be aware of the stress experienced by patients, recognise the factors that may cause stress, plan, implement and evaluate basic nursing interventions such as increasing coping strategies and social support in the management and alleviation of stress, informing and counselling, increasing the patients orientation, and enabling the patient to participate in care in order to reduce the level of stress experienced by patients and protect their physical and biopsychosocial integrity.

There are no studies in the literature examining the effects of listening to audio recordings, which is an easy, inexpensive and non-pharmacological intervention for stress management of patients in intensive care units.