Development of a Novel Massage Therapy Outcome Measure for Children and Young Adults Receiving Hematopoietic Cell Transplant

Abstract

Background: Children receiving hema-topoietic stem cell transplantation (HCT) often experience an unfortunate sequa-lae of negative effects including pain, deconditioning, and anxiety. Massage therapy (MT) has demonstrated effective non-pharmacological management of fatigue, pain, and anxiety in patients undergoing cancer treatment. Existing studies have been limited by the lack of available MT-specific outcome measures to track responses to interventions. Purpose: This study aimed to describe the creation of a novel MT-specific outcome measure to be utilized in the pediatric acute-care setting and establish construct validity for this measure to assess clinical effectiveness of MT interventions. Setting: An oncology ward at a large pediatric tertiary medical center in the United States. Participants: A total of 58 children and young adults undergoing HCT. Research Design: Retrospective Co-hort Study. Intervention: A panel of massage therapists created a novel outcome measure, OMPREP, for use in MT sessions and per-formed a literature review to ensure face validity of the tool. This outcome measure was administered to patients and data were collected retrospectively to assess construct validity. Results: A total of 1,333 MT sessions were completed (80.7% completion rate) with the novel OMPREP outcome measure utilized on 100% of visits. Mean engagement (p