Action Teams

The Public Relations Action Team is responsible for this website and for the EMTC Facebook and Twitter accounts. We collaborate with all the other Action Teams to publish and disseminate their work via the internet.

An important element of the PR team’s activity is European Music Therapy Day, which is celebrated each year on 15th November. This initiative began in 2014 under the leadership of Albert Berman and the Dutch Association for Music Therapy but, since 2021, a team from the Croatian Association of Music Therapists has carried the project forward. For questions relating to European Music Therapy Day, please send an email to info@musictherapyday.eu.

The team email for the Public Relations AT is publicrelations@emtc-eu.com but you can also write to members of the team by clicking on their email icon below.

The Recognition Action Team gathers and shares information about the legal status of the music therapy profession in European countries. Countries which have already achieved regulation can offer inspiration and experience about their process to support and encourage music therapy associations which are working towards it. This information is also useful for politicians and others involved in quality control of professions, for example. The European map of countries where legal recognition has been achieved provides a useful overview of the countries in Europe that have achieved recognition and detailed information about the processes and factors involved.

Our current goals are:

–          to finish and evaluate the “recognition” documentation and the questionnaire;

–          to formulate concrete “recognition/regulation” support;

–          to prepare topics and important points for a roundtable at the EMTC conference in Hamburg 2025.

The team email for the Recognition AT is recognition@emtc-eu.com but you can also write to members of the team by clicking on their email icon below.

The Research Action Team gathers and shares information about music therapy research studies that are taking place across Europe. The importance and role of research to both the practice and profession of music therapy is well acknowledged. Research challenges us to modify the way we work as music therapists, helps define direction for new discoveries, reaffirms what we know and helps us change the way we view what we already know. Research can lead to developments as well as support jobs. It is these possibilities of discovery and change that make research so exciting and diverse.

An increasing number of trained music therapy researchers and clinicians from many parts of the world, therefore, have taken on the challenge of conducting research and are directly or implicitly influencing the music therapy journeys of others. Music therapy research increasingly reflects the diverse and growing areas of the practice and profession of music therapy.

The EMTC Research Action Team knows how challenging it can be to identify research projects relevant to a specific area of study and has therefore created an open access database of research projects carried out in Europe in the past fifteen years. The process of creating the database is described here.

The team email for the Research AT is research@emtc-eu.com but you can also write to members of the team by clicking on their email icon below.

Background and aim of AT: There is a great deal of variation in music therapy supervision across European countries. We see a need for a unified approach to develop and strengthen supervision because it serves as a quality control of music therapy provision and provides accountability to society. Therefore, we decided to investigate the situation of music therapy supervision in European countries belonging to the EMTC.

The first goal in this process was to find similarities, common trends and good examples in music therapy supervision amongst EMTC member associations. In order to achieve this goal, we sent a questionnaire to member associations including questions about the requirements and standards for professional music therapy supervision in each country.

The second goal is to share the results of the questionnaire on the EMTC website, at music therapy conferences and/or in a joint article.

The third goal is the development of proposals and recommendations for EMTC member associations regarding music therapy supervision.

Achievements: The first step in this process was to compile a questionnaire for EMTC member associations.

Beginning in October 2021, our team members collected information about supervision requirements in their own country associations. Based on the information received, we devised questions for the questionnaire to explore the practice of supervision of other countries. In this way, we got a broader view of the subject and interests. During Zoom meetings the most important questions were selected and the questionnaire was finalised as a Google Form in Spring 2022. We tested the questionnaire among team members, with 6 countries completing it as a pilot. The questionnaire was reviewed by the EMTC board members during September-October 2022 and then sent out to EMTC country representatives. The deadline for responses was February 2023. We are now analysing the received responses and hope to present the first results at the EMTC General Assembly in Liepaja, Latvia in May 2023.

The team email for the Supervision AT is supervision@emtc-eu.com but you can also write to members of the team by clicking on their email icon below.