Play Therapy to Reduce the Anxiety Among Hospitalized Children

Abstract

Play therapy helps to meet the emotional needs of children who have an illness or surgery & are in the hospital. A quasi-experimental outcome research study was conducted in two hospitals in different areas of Nadiad, with one assigned as the control and the other as the experimental hospital. Purposive sampling technique was used to select total 40 samples. Modied Anxiety Scale was used to assess the level of anxiety. The data was analyzed by using the descriptive and inferential statistics. The result of present study reveals that there is a reduced level of anxiety after administering the play therapy in experimental group. The mean pre-test anxiety score (53.70) was higher than the mean post-test (23.95) anxiety score in experimental group with the mean difference of 29.75, which shows there is a reduce level of anxiety after administering play therapy in experimental group. The post test anxiety score of control group (42.9) is higher thant the post test anxiety score (23.95) of experimental group, which shows there is a higher level of anxiety in control group. There is no signicant association between level of anxiety and demographic variables. The study concluded that there is a need of play therapy to reduce the anxiety and stress of hospitalized children.