Campaign Newsletter:  Winter  2003

Jo Ann Barnett, C.R.N.P., M.S.N., loved everyone—and everyone loved her, but no one expected her to accomplish all that she did during her foreshortened life. Her sister Patty Barnett, who recently retired from the Division of Occupational Therapy at UAB, explains that Jo Ann had a learning disorder and was not a strong student when she was growing up in Sylacauga. Once Jo Ann decided she wanted to be a nurse, however, nothing stopped her from reaching her goal.

By tape-recording lectures and listening to them over and over again, Jo Ann successfully completed first her L.P.N. training at Nunnally Junior College, then a diploma at St. Vincent’s School of Nursing, followed by a bachelor’s degree at UAB in nursing in 1987, a master’s degree at UAB in nursing in 1990, and her neonatal nurse practitioner certification in 1991 from UAB’s School of Nursing.

Patty notes that Jo Ann started taking care of newborns almost by accident. After serving as an adult nurse in the U.S. Air Force during the late 1970s, she accepted a position in the NICU unit of a military hospital in Germany. Jo Ann mistakenly assumed she would be caring for adult neurology and neurosurgery patients and didn’t realize she would be working with infants until shortly before she was scheduled to leave Birmingham. Undaunted, she purchased a textbook on neonatal nursing at the UAB bookstore and studied it during her overseas flight. After a few weeks on her new job, Jo Ann knew she had found her calling.

In the mid-1980s Jo Ann returned to Birmingham and devoted herself to caring for sick, premature babies at UAB’s Regional Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, Children’s Hospital, and other Birmingham hospitals. Over the years she generously helped hundreds of children through her professional expertise as well as her compassion and charity. Family and colleagues recall Jo Ann buying countless cribs and car seats for families who couldn’t afford them. When she learned that one family had sold their television to pay for travel expenses to Birmingham, she gave them her own. On another occasion Jo Ann assisted a family whose child had died by taking care of funeral expenses.

Throughout her 25-year career Jo Ann received numerous awards recognizing her excellent clinical skills and her exemplary care of patients. Last year the Alumni Association of the School of Nursing honored her by establishing the Jo Ann Barnett Award for Compassionate Nursing Care.

In 1999 Jo Ann was diagnosed with renal cell cancer and underwent surgery. Determined to continue nursing, she worked until a recurrence two years later. Surgery revealed a noncurable condition that forced her to retire. When Jo Ann’s colleague and friend Joseph B. Philips III, M.D., approached her with the idea of a scholarship in her name for a neonatal nurse practitioner student, she heartily agreed. Dr. Philips spearheaded the effort to raise the funds, and her family, friends, and colleagues have generously contributed more than $25,000 to establish the Jo Ann Barnett Endowed Nursing Scholarship.

Jo Ann died on June 17, 2002, but her memory lives on. The endowed scholarship in her honor will have a positive impact on the lives and careers of future neonatal nurses as well as the health and well-being of infants for generations to come.

“When I heard that Jo Ann’s cancer had come back and that the attempt to remove it had failed, I wanted to do something meaningful and permanent to remember this wonderful person,” says Dr. Philips, who is a neonatologist and professor of pediatrics in the School of Medicine. “She was my friend, my colleague, and someone with whom I could share my own fears about cancer and death. I miss her terribly, and I am proud to have been able to help in the establishment of this permanent memorial in honor of the life of Jo Ann Barnett. She was truly one of a kind.”

“It is especially gratifying to see a physician pay tribute to a nurse by helping establish a scholarship in her memory, for it also pays tribute to the partnership between physician and nurse that is so important to patient care,” emphasizes Rachel Z. Booth, Ph.D., R.N., dean of the School of Nursing. “And there is another part of this story that is equally gratifying—the large number of gifts from Jo Ann’s colleagues and even from the families of her little patients. This scholarship, as much as any I can name, underscores the power of one nurse to make a difference in the lives of the people she encounters. We are so proud to claim Jo Ann as our graduate, and we look forward to awarding her scholarship for the first time this year.”

For more information please contact:
The Office of Development and Alumni Relations
218 School of Nursing Building
1701 University Boulevard
Phone: (205) 975-8936
Fax: 205-934-0269