April Winborne
MSN, APRN, FNP-C, IVTMC, CPUI, CRNI, CCRN, CVAA(c), VA-BC
President and Founder, Northeast Louisiana Vascular Access Network (NELAVAN)
A Network of the Association for Vascular Access (AVA)
April Winborne is a vascular access specialist and nursing leader with more than three decades at Franklin Medical Center, a 37-bed rural hospital in Winnsboro, Louisiana, and the only hospital within an hour in any direction. She started there as an LPN on the medical-surgical floor, worked her way through charge nurse and house supervisor across the ICU and emergency department, and has served as Director of Nursing since 2009.
In 2012 she built the hospital’s vascular access program, taking it from turning away PICC patients to offering advanced ultrasound-guided and tunneled access rarely found in a rural setting. She remains the hospital’s sole provider of ultrasound-guided central venous access. In 2025 she created a VA-BC certification pathway and personally trained every participant, growing the hospital from one board-certified vascular access nurse to eight in a year.
She practices where there is no interventional radiology and no specialist peer down the hall. Her practice is built on the literature and on the specialists she reads, hears, and learns from. That is not a Louisiana problem. Wherever a nurse works far from an academic center, in rural America or anywhere in the world, the same questions arise, and the answers travel. She founded NELAVAN, Louisiana’s first vascular access network, to give the specialty a regional voice, and has taught nursing students in the clinical setting since 2017.
She is writing a vascular access and infusion therapy textbook, planned for donation-based distribution, and building an online VA-BC preparation course, because access to specialty education should not depend on where a nurse works. theVEIN is where she puts that work in one place for the nurses who need it.
Education
- Master of Science in Nursing, Family Nurse Practitioner, Frontier Nursing University
- Associate Degree in Nursing, Louisiana Tech University
- Practical Nursing, Louisiana Technical College
Publication and Recognition
Ostroff M, Elzomor H, Weite TA, Garcia D, Ahn J, Stanko O, Anderson K, Winborne A, Alexandrou E. Femoral to abdomen tunneling at the bedside for medium/long term venous access. J Vasc Access. 2025;26(3):1000-1008.
“Going the Extra (Thousand) Miles for Patient Care.” VACC Newsletter, Vol. 3, Issue 2, Vascular Access Certification Corporation, December 2023.
Mr. Wayne Martin
The reason for all of this. NELAVAN was founded in his dedicated memory, shared here with his family’s permission.
After months of repeated line complications, Mr. Martin was running out of options for chemotherapy. His central line was occluded, its tip poorly positioned from central venous stenosis, and the bow hunter and fisherman was spending more of his life on infusions than living it. “If you can’t make this work for me, I’m done,” he told April. “I’m giving up, and I’m tired.”
Weeks later, at a training in New Jersey with Matthew Ostroff, MSN, APRN, VA-BC, at St. Joseph’s University Hospital, the two worked out what he needed: a femoral catheter tunneled to the abdomen, so an active man could keep doing what he loved. Ostroff offered to travel to Louisiana to place it, but the procedure could not be approved at April’s hospital. So she brought Mr. Martin to him. A week after finishing her training, she was back on a plane to New Jersey with Mr. Martin and his wife.
Within an hour of arriving, he had his new line. Months later, April called it the best line any of her patients has. Ostroff’s institution covered the procedure, Mr. Martin’s church raised the travel money, and a GoFundMe April created covered the rest, along with her own money: funds her father left her when he passed. “I never knew what to do with it,” she said, “but he said I’d figure it out one day.”
“Sometimes I wonder why this is happening. Why I have cancer, why I’m being flown here to get this access. Maybe it’s all so I can help somebody else.”
Mr. Wayne Martin, waiting for the procedure
“April sought out the knowledge. She didn’t wait for someone to give it to her.”
Matthew Ostroff, MSN, APRN, VA-BC