Tara White

Tara White has a very diverse background in healthcare, allowing her to approach difficult situations and drive success through inter-professional collaboration and fresh new initiatives. She’s held positions as a clinical nurse in critical care, emergency medicine, infection prevention. She has also helped manage the emergency preparedness program for a multi-hospital system that is the largest 911 provider service in the county. She provides consulting services on infection prevention topics to long-term care facilities and outpatient surgery centers in the Philadelphia, PA area.

Tara seeks out challenges in healthcare that seem impossible to others. Her recent exposure and assimilation of lean principles into her work has opened many new pathways and ideas that she is integrating into her field of expertise. In addition to Tara’s master’s degree in nursing, she holds dual certifications as a certified infection prevention and control nurse (CIC) and as a clinical nurse leader (CNL).

Most recently, Tara has taken these new principles and helped to lead a group of OR nurses, quality department associates, surgeons, managers and physicians to establish a weekly huddle in conjunction with detailed surgical case reviews to help identify opportunities for prevention. The group has reduced surgical site infection impact on their patient population by 50% over a six-month period. 

A few years prior, she helped a multi-disciplinary team reduce their surgical site infection impact on their obstetric population. Along with creating a unique obstetrically-based bundle of best practices that she co-wrote, the team’s success was mainly attributed to their implementation of an in-service program and enhanced process for physicians’ offices to screen for methicillin resistant staphylococci (MRSA) and methicillin-susceptible Staphylococcus aureus (MSSA). The team’s success led the facility to receive an excellence award for surgical site infection prevention at the annual ANA national conference. This reduction program was also selected to be presented through the Hospital Association of Pennsylvania’s monthly educational topics.