Brigitte Vola, wound, ostomy and continence nurse in Trauma Services, is the 2023 winner of the President’s Award for Excellence in Shared Values.Brigitte Vola was always going to go into health care. Looking back, it is not much of a surprise that she ended up as a wound-care nurse, either.
“My dad was a paramedic, and my favorite shows were ‘Rescue 911’ and ‘ER,’” said Vola, wound, ostomy and continence nurse in Trauma Services. She started out working on an ambulance as part of a plan to become a doctor by way of nursing school. She was immediately hooked. “If ambulance paid well, I would not have done anything different,” Vola said. “I loved the excitement, the wounds.” Then, in nursing school, Vola “always wanted to go to the surgical ICU — the big wounds were what interested me,” she said. But she graduated with her associate degree in 2008 as the economy tanked and the closing of Birmingham’s Carraway Hospital flooded the market with nurses. “Spain Rehab took a chance on me, and I ended up staying,” Vola said.
Patients at UAB and around the state have benefited from that. As president of the Central Alabama Wound, Ostomy and Continence Nurses Association, Vola led a years-long effort to convince Alabama Medicaid to expand coverage of ostomy supplies. The change took effect in April 2023, and it “was a huge win for our Medicaid ostomy patients” that “will lead to less frequent clinic and emergency room visits,” according to Vola’s colleague Kristina Collins. “This victory grew out of Brigitte’s concern for her ostomy patients’ having to cope with an incredible life change made all the more difficult by not having the most basic supplies,” added Karen Edwards, wound ostomy and continence nurse lead. Vola “spends her energy making everyone around her better,” Edwards said.
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Effecting statewide change should be enough for one year. But Vola also presented a poster in Las Vegas at the national meeting of wound, ostomy and continence nurses last summer on a separate project that eliminated pressure ulcers in a critically ill patient population in UAB’s cardiac-related ICUs and floor units. “Her knowledge in these areas makes her an expert among experts and is unlikely replicated anywhere else in the country,” said Marty Vander Noot, M.D., Vola’s direct supervisor and chief of the Inpatient Wound Care Service for the Division of Acute Care Surgery.
In July 2023, Vola was chosen as one of three second-quarter 2023 honorees of the UAB Shared Values in Action Program. Now she has been named the 2023 recipient of the President’s Award for Excellence in Shared Values.
The Reporter sat down with Vola to find out what drives her. Why, for example, does she persist in time-consuming projects that, as her letters of recommendation make clear, go far beyond her normal work responsibilities? She offered four pieces of advice that could help any employee make the most of their time at UAB.
Find your fit
“It is a cliche, but you have to find what you love,” Vola said. “If you are not in a patient population or unit that you enjoy, then that is not the right place for you. The beauty of nursing and health care is there is always some place different to go. If you find the passion, it is easy to do the rest.”
"Her knowledge... makes her an expert among experts and is unlikely replicated anywhere else in the country."
Rehab nursing did not have the adrenaline rush she experienced in ambulances or the ER, “but I found that I really enjoyed the connections I made with patients,” Vola said. “I could teach them that, even if they had had a stroke, a brain injury or a spinal cord injury, it was not the end of the world. They could still have a normal life with that ‘new normal.’” When an opportunity came for her to move into a wound nursing position, Vola found that it offered that connection as well. “Nobody wants to have an ostomy,” she said. “But I have an opportunity to show them, ‘You can do this. Here’s how.’”
Apply it yourself
Not sure how to grow your career at UAB — or how to find out all of the opportunities available here? UAB Learning and Development offers career development courses and workshops throughout the year. See all upcoming classes online.
Get involved
What if you have found your niche but are looking to grow? Soon after she started at Spain Rehab, Vola broke her arm. “When I came back, my manager said, ‘You will be the rehab division representative on the Nurse Practice Council,” she said. That allowed her to participate in multiple projects throughout the hospital. “It is also where I learned about the Professional Nurse Development Program,” or PNDP, Vola said. She became a PNDP Level II nurse then a PNDP Level III nurse. “Those achievements helped lead toward my becoming one of the assistant nurse managers at Spain Rehab and then ultimately joining the Wound, Ostomy and Continence Team,” she said.
“When you get involved, it fires a passion beyond just your unit,” Vola said. “It is easy to get frustrated with the rut of daily patient care. Getting involved with committees and organizations lets you get out of that, and you can see what else is going on around the hospital and beyond. Then you can bring that back to your own area.”
"When you get involved, it fires a passion beyond just your unit. It is easy to get frustrated with the rut of daily patient care. Getting involved with committees and organizations lets you get out of that, and you can see what else is going on around the hospital and beyond."
Vola’s work with the ECMO Pressure Injury Prevention Committee has benefited some of UAB’s most critically ill patients, and had national reach. ECMO stands for extracorporeal membrane oxygenation — it is a machine that can provide lifesaving support for hearts and/or lungs that are too ill to function. “ECMO patients are at any point in time the sickest in the state,” said Vander Noot, the medical director of the Inpatient Wound Care Team. They are also at high risk for developing skin breakdown and pressure injuries from the equipment that is keeping them alive. Vola is part of an interdisciplinary team that created new protocols to reduce these injuries. Just one example of the work, Vander Noot says, was Vola’s efforts to find the ideal offloading boots to stop injuries to patients’ heels while lying in bed. “It would have been easy to simply promote the use of our existing offloading boots,” Vander Noot said. “However, because of the collaborative nature of this committee and need to work together, it was determined that there were other issues at play regarding these patients’ legs …. So Brigitte worked with Physical and Occupational Therapy to trial multiple boots so that all of these issues could be optimized. This is just one of many examples of the small changes implemented by this workgroup.”
"I don’t do any of this alone. Without co-workers and colleagues and the amazing team I work with, none of this would be possible. Every one of my accomplishments is a team accomplishment."
Those changes added up to major improvement. “We went from 33 percent of patients with medical device-related pressure injuries to 0 percent and maintained that for two calendar years,” Vola said. “We are very proud of that.” In June 2023, Vola presented on this work at the national Wound Care, Ostomy and Continence Nursing conference in Las Vegas. “We got a lot of super-positive feedback, and further meetings with other organizations came out of that,” she said. “They wanted to learn more about what we do here.”
Apply it yourself
One way to learn more about UAB, play a role in shared decision-making and get to know your fellow employees is to become a department representative with the UAB Staff Council. The council’s monthly meetings are open to all staff. Nominations for new representatives take place in the spring. Watch the eReporter for a link to the form when it is open.
It is a team effort
“I don’t do any of this alone,” Vola said. “Without co-workers and colleagues and the amazing team I work with, none of this would be possible. Every one of my accomplishments is a team accomplishment.”
The ECMO work involved “a big interdisciplinary team,” Vola noted. “We changed sedation protocols, integrated pressure injury dialogue into daily rounds, got the physicians on board, the nurses looking, PTs looking — it took everyone being aware and looking and paying attention.”
Vola’s nomination letters make it clear that she is a “great teammate,” too. “We are so much better with Brigitte,” Edwards said. “She is guided by fairness, is not daunted by challenges and spends her energy making everyone around her better.”
Apply it yourself
Collaboration does not come naturally to everyone. UAB provides several opportunities for you (or your team) to improve in this area. Check out these programs, job aids and resources from UAB Learning & Development.
If you see a need …
“If I see something that needs to be done, I am generally not one who will sit back,” Vola said. “I feel like, if it needs to get done, I might as well jump in and take part.”
"That was a fantastic moment. It is very gratifying to know that these changes go beyond UAB and beyond Birmingham and affect the entire state. And I certainly did not do it alone."
The issue of Medicaid coverage for ostomy supplies was a regular discussion point for the Central Alabama Wound, Ostomy and Continence Nurses Association. Another nurse had started the process of finding out what was involved in making the case for coverage changes. “It was very overwhelming,” Vola said. “But we started talking about it again at a dinner and I said, ‘Why don’t we just plan to go ahead and move forward?’”
Vola started by talking with ostomy supply companies; one put her in touch with a staff member who helped her collect information for her presentation. She talked with nurses and GI surgeons and others affected all over the state, collected personal letters, and picked out the specific codes that were the highest priority for adding to Medicaid payment. After she submitted the presentation to the state Medicaid offices, Vola was asked to provide financial information on the difference in cost between increased reimbursement expenses and reductions in hospital visits and other charges if patients could gain access to the needed supplies. “Brigitte was able to show that insurance coverage for more complex ostomy supplies would save Medicaid money over time,” Collins said.
“That was a fantastic moment,” Vola said. “It is very gratifying to know that these changes go beyond UAB and beyond Birmingham and affect the entire state. And I certainly did not do it alone.”
Her involvement in projects like these whetted Vola’s appetite to learn more about nursing informatics. She has been working on her master’s degree in the field for a number of years and aims to graduate in June 2024. “Nursing informatics has the opportunity to increase nurse efficiency and patient safety,” Vola said. “I have always been interested in making things better.”
Apply it yourself
UAB has a number of opportunities for career development and personal growth. Through the university’s educational assistance program, employees can earn new degrees at the undergraduate or graduate level. Looking for professional certifications? The Collat School of Business offers a range of Career Advancement Courses in project management, social media, data visualization and more. And there are thousands of courses available any time and at no charge through UAB’s LinkedIn Learning platform.
