A new study from the University of Kentucky (UK) confirmed what the healthcare industry already knew: horses help people, the Lexington Herald-Leader reported
UK's College of Agriculture and UK's Center for leadership conducted the two-year study and concluded that horses help people develop empathy, as well as improve social and leadership skills.
Twenty-one nurses from the UK Chandler Hospital participated in non-riding, non-verbal exercises. In one exercise, the participants were split into two teams and each team had to get a horse to follow them with out touching or talking to it.
"They realized by working with these horses that their behavior and their unit culture effects... their patients, their families and their co-workers," Janine Lindgreen, a clinical nursing specialist and co-investigator of the study, said.
Denise Splitter, program director of Central Kentucky Riding for Hope, was not surprised by the results, but was encouraged that it was catching on.
"We see it every day," she said. "I thank the staff and faculty over at UK for what they're doing."
Splitter hopes the UK researchers can help make hippotherapy, emotional and physical therapy with the use of horses, a more popular practice.
Riding for Hope is a therapy center focused on hippotherapy. They treat children and adults with emotional and physical needs and, as they already knew, horses are therapeutic animals.
"If horses can increase our ability to understand ourselves and others better, then the healthcare industry is a perfect place for studies like these," Lissa Pohl, the study's project manager, said. "When nurses and doctors benefit from collaborating with horses then ultimately their patients also benefit."
Pohl said the study does not show improvements in people's learning ability and the small amount of participants make it hard to conclude any evidence. However, she said the initial results are encouraging and will make future testing easier.
Lindgreen said the nurses changed the attitude of their working environment based on their experiences with the horses.
"The first and the biggest change that they decided they needed to make was changing their own attitude and their own unit culture," she said. "They realized that the unit culture wasn't always therapeutic for the patients or the families."
