Susan McLean Whitehurst has more than 34 years of health care experience including subspecialty administrative and clinical practice experience from Duke University Hospital in surgical/trauma intensive care, neurosurgery/neurology, cardiovascular/cardiology heart center, perioperative administration and senior executive leadership over emergency services, critical care, operating rooms, oncology services and aligned support services such as infection control, health information management, sterile processing, wound management, preoperative screening, guest services and social work.
Between 2004 -2011, Susan served as the President and CEO of SRM Healthcare Solutions in Hillsborough, North Carolina. Her responsibilities included facilitation of physician advisory boards regionally and nationally, senior leadership training and mentoring in lean health care quality improvement programs, and she served as an adjunct faculty member of the Six Sigma instructor team at North Carolina State University since 2005. As a certified Six Sigma Master Black Belt and instructor for North Carolina State University, she provided green belt, black belt and master black belt courses, lean health care training, and error proofing workshops for customers from southeast region hospitals and health care organizations. Her passion and areas of influence are in medical error prevention through the use of process analysis tools, using evidence, mentoring senior leaders in linking cost of poor quality in quality improvement efforts and designing operational tools that eliminate system issues that create human error.
Mrs. Whitehurst maintains a certification in organizational diagnosis, redesign and team building, and she completed her graduate study research in building high performance teams.
She is currently the Project Manager for Joint Commission Resources’ Partnership for Patients Hospital Engagement Network and a senior consultant for Joint Commission Resources.
Her extensive consulting experience, both internally for Duke University and externally to other organizations over the years, her regional and national presentations on lean six sigma, error proofing, perioperative redesign, organizational diagnosis and development, and leadership effectiveness, as well as her corporate partnership experiences, have enabled her to influence research-based changes at the multidisciplinary practice level within many institutions.
Mrs. Whitehurst received her BSN from East Carolina University and her master’s degree from Duke University.