Honors and the Creative Arts in Nursing: Music Therapy to Decrease Anxiety in Critical Care Patients

In nursing education, we strive for a delicate balance between the science and the art of nursing. While curricular objectives address standards of practice assuring competencies in pathophysiology, pharmacology, clinical fundamentals, medical nursing, surgical nursing, and other domains of health science, we also purport to produce a practitioner with sensitivity and compassion. The honors in nursing option, begun in 2000 at UAB, has allowed us to push the creative side of nursing to a higher level. Honors students have clearly taken this opportunity with enthusiasm. Our first nursing honors graduate, Ms. Cynthia Leach-Fuller, investigated an application of music therapy in nursing while she was a student in our program. The research she completed, a discussion of which follows, exemplifies the creative process in a scientific setting