Honors and the Creative Arts in Nursing: Music Therapy to Decrease Anxiety in Critical Care Patients (Splicing the Creative Arts Into Non-Arts Courses‪)‬

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. Ms. Leach-Fuller joined our inaugural class of honors students in nursing as an experienced registered nurse. She had begun the process of completing requirements for the BSN. From her initial interview, it was obvious that she possessed both great knowledge and creativity. She was seeking to reach the highest levels of accomplishment in the profession to which she was already committed. The honors program represented both the culmination of long-held dreams and a legitimately earned position.