Sylvia Garcia-Houchins, RN, MBA, CIC
Consultant, Joint Commission Resources, Inc.
Sylvia Garcia-Houchins knew she wanted to be in health care since the young age of 16. Her ninth grade chemistry teacher helped her win a scholarship from the American Cancer Society to work as a volunteer in a hospital for a summer. “I started on my 16th birthday working in the pediatric clinical microbiology lab. The doctors did daily lab rounds and talked about the patients and how our results made a difference in the care they provided and the patients’ outcomes. I was hooked.”
Ms. Garcia-Houchins has now accumulated more than 25 years of experience in infection control in both hospital and long term care settings, as well as eight years of clinical microbiology experience. She is currently the director of the infection control program at the University of Chicago Medical Center.
Through the years, Ms. Garcia-Houchins has provided infection prevention and control consultation in a variety of health care settings, including hospitals, health clinics and dialysis centers, training infection control practitioners, serving on the faculty for the Association of Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC) basic training course and being a member of APIC National Program Committee. She has also conducted hospital assessments and developed educational programs responsive to the needs of the community, geographic region and country and has authored articles and book chapters related to infection control, including a chapter in the APIC Text.
Ms. Garcia-Houchins is passionate about health care because “I can help people, sometimes as a group and sometimes one at a time. Being a patient in the hospitals or having a family member or friend in the hospital is probably the most vulnerable time of most people’s lives. They are depending on me to do the right things to make sure that they have a good outcome.” It is that passion that inspired her to go back to school at the age of 42 to get her nursing degree.
Ms. Garcia-Houchins earned a degree in biochemistry and molecular biology from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois and a master’s of business administration from the Keller Graduate School of Management.
Ms. Garcia-Houchins believes there are many challenges facing health care, one of which is realizing that health care is “not a production line, it’s a service industry.” She believes that health care workers need to realize that that everything they do, positive or negative, makes a difference to each and every patient and coworker.