Effect of a brief seated massage on nursing student attitudes toward touch for comfort care

While massage has been removed from nursing curricula, studies have reported massage as safe and effective for stress reduction, relaxation, pain relief, fatigue, and quality of life.

To compare the efficacy of two intensities of touch administered during two seated massages on the attitudes of nursing students toward touch for their self-care and patient care.

Nursing students who volunteered gave institutional review board-approved written informed consent to undergo massage by a licensed massage therapist.

A private room adjacent to the nursing lab in a school of nursing.

Brief seated massages of differing intensities. Each participant received low-intensity and high-intensity touch in a two-block, randomized order, within-subjects design. Linear mixed models nested within subject and random intercept analyses were used to test hypotheses in this two-treatment, two-sequence, two-period crossover design.

Health questionnaires/visual analogue scales pertaining to physical/affective/and attitudinal status were completed before and after each massage.

Twenty-nine participants (93% female, 83% single) completed the study. Before massage, the optimal intensity of touch anticipated for self-comfort was 6.6 (0=no pressure;10=most intense pressure imaginable). The mean touch intensities were 6.7 for high-intensity massage and 0.5 for low-intensity (p<0.001). The overall percentage differences (feeling better or worse) following massage were as follows: low intensity, 37.5% better; high intensity, 62.7% better (p<0.001). Significantly more improvement was reported for energy, pain, stress, and feeling physically uptight after high-intensity compared with low-intensity (p<0.03). Participants were more likely to both receive touch for self-care and provide touch for patient care after experiencing high- versus low-intensity massage (p<0.01).

High-intensity seated massage was more efficacious than low-intensity massage and positively influenced nursing student attitudes toward the inclusion of massage in self-care/patient care. The role of touch for self-care/patient care in the nursing curricula merits reconsideration.