Frequent and inadequately treated pain combined with separation from the parent cause adverse interruptions to the parent-infant attachment process. The pain might harm the infant physically and psychologically including increasing the risk for abnormally heightened sensitivity to pain. Effective pain management strategies are needed and parent-delivered interventions such as infant-directed lullaby singing, breastfeeding and skin-to-skin contact where parents themselves mediate pain relief, is consistent with a modern understanding of pain and of family-integrated care. Important for translating research into practice is to involve healthcare professionals and parents as co-researchers. Neonatal pain research is an interdisciplinary field where music therapy has just started to publish results. The Nordic neonatal music therapy pain management strategy provides a theoretical and practical resource-oriented music therapy model of how parent-delivered infant-directed singing can be comprehensively used in interdisciplinary neonatal pain research. Parents as pain management in Swedish neonatal care (SWEpap), is a new cutting-edge interdisciplinary multi-centre clinical study with mixed methods. The collaborative participatory action research design for the qualitative part of the SWEpap study aims to democratise the research process involving both parents and health professionals in the knowledge-making. The second part of SWEpap is a randomised controlled trial informed by music therapy expertise and research using the Nordic neonatal music therapy pain management strategy as a theoretical framework for its design. The RCT will investigate the efficacy of combined pain management with live parental lullaby singing, breastfeeding and skin-to-skin contact compared with standard pain care during routine metabolic screening of newborn infants.