The operating theatre staff is exposed to various constraints such as excessive working hours, severe medical conditions and dreadful consequences in case of malpractice. These working conditions may lead to high and chronic levels of stress, which can interfere with medical staff well-being and patients quality of care. The aim of this study is toassess the impact of music therapy on stress levels and burnout risk on the operating room staff. This is a preexperimental study including the operating rooms staff of urology and maxillofacial surgery in the academic hospital of Sahloul Sousse (Tunisia) over a period of six weeks. The study consisted of three phases. The first was an initial assessment of stress level with a predefined survey. The second included three music therapy sessions per day over one month. The third was an immediate stress level reassessment following the intervention. Stress levels were evaluated using the Perceived Stress Scale version PSS-10 and the Maslach Burnout Inventory. The overall response rate was 73.9%.The average age of the study population was 37.8 ± 7.7 years with a female predominance (64.7%). After the music therapy program, Perceived Stress Scale average score decreased from 22 ± 8.9 to 16 ± 7.9 (p = 0.006). Concerning the burnout, only the average score of emotional exhaustion decreased significantly from 27 ± 10.8 to 19.2 ± 9.5 (p = 0.004). Music therapy is an innovative approach that seems to reduce operating theatre staff stress. It must be considered as a non pharmacological, simple, economic and non invasive preventive tool.

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Over the last few decades several methods have been used to compute the propagation coefficient, which is a complex number that provides information about the viscoelastic properties of blood vessels. Results from these methods show a considerable disparity between them and when they are compared to theoretical values. Moreover, the attenuation and phase velocity obtained by the three-point method shows more significant discrepancies than those obtained by the other methods. In order to clarify the source of the disparity of results carried out by various methods concerning the estimation of phase velocity and attenuation in the arterial network, we made investigations using numerical tool several methods. We studied, for each method, the effects of distance between measurement sites, the sampling interval and measurement errors on the determination of the propagation coefficient by each of these methods. The values of wave speed and attenuation computed by these methods were compared to the known input values. Our simulation demonstrates that the distance between measurement sites and the sampling interval may introduce significant errors when the noise becomes high. Moreover the error on the values of attenuation and phase velocity obtained by occlusion and three-point methods is significantly higher than the error on the values obtained by RV-I and RV-II methods for all experimental conditions studied within the examined frequency range. This result supports the idea that the discrepancy between studies reported in literature seems to be due to the inaccuracy of experimental measurement techniques and not associated with the methods themselves as concluded by some authors.

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