Carol is a natural leader who is the embodiment of our hospital’s mission and values. She has been responsible for the implementation of countless innovative initiatives, all of which have had a major impact at Shady Grove Medical Center and system-wide. She has always set forth in her work a clear vision for nursing that focused on inspiring lifelong learning, fostering meaningful interpersonal relationships, and offering personal and professional development opportunities.

The amount of work that Carol has done to improve our hospital is nothing short of awe-inspiring. In the mid-2000s, as the hospital began to introduce the patient-centered Planetree philosophy into our culture, Carol was on the front lines because of her passion for bringing meaningful patient interactions back into healthcare. Also passionate about the powerful connection between nature and healing, she was instrumental in leading a committee that brought the Barbara Truland-Butz Healing Garden to SGMC ten years ago. Today the garden remains a serene sanctuary for staff, visitors, and patients alike.

Under her leadership, SGMC’s first-ever Nurse Residency Program was established in 2015. As her leadership role evolved, Carol embarked on designing the Professional Career Advancement Program (PCAP) for nurses across the system, which replaced the clinical ladder. Over the past 5 years, PCAP has challenged nurses to test their limits by advancing in their careers through impactful initiatives outlined in a professional portfolio. Carol has been a great advocate for our very best caregivers to be recognized as leaders among their peers with the prestigious title of PCAP Nurse. She continues to serve on the PCAP review board while individually mentoring many of the program’s applicants. Her vision for advancing the nursing profession is now extending to CNAs.

She was the executive sponsor for an innovative training and employment program called the CNA Academy, which launched in January 2022. Her vision for the program is clear: hiring employees who are paid to complete their CNA training course in-house eliminates the cost barrier and ensures they will be well prepared to work in an acute care setting. Providing our own internally-developed curriculum means that from day one CNAs will be instructed in alignment with the AHC mission and values. Carol hopes for this program to also serve as a pipeline for those interested in progressing to nursing someday. In its first year under Carol’s leadership, the Academy has already produced more than 40 new CNAs fulfilling our mission at our hospitals.

Carol has found a way to merge professional development with personal development by bringing Emotional Intelligence (EQ) training and Franklin Covey resources to AHC. She is a certified EQ coach, facilitating workshops for teams across many of our entities. With a genuine love of people, Carol has delighted in every chance she gets to meet individually with EQ participants and coach them on their strengths and opportunities for improvement as indicated by their individual assessments. In connection with EQ education, Carol felt it was also important to introduce the organization to Franklin Covey because both have so many overlapping concepts. The partnership with Franklin Covey gave all nursing leaders the opportunity to attend workshops such as The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Managers and Unconscious Bias. Even years after attending it, many leaders have credited the 7 Habits seminar for transforming the way they lead their teams and interact with each other.

Thanks to Carol’s advocacy for nursing leadership development, an entire library of online resources for personal and professional growth is now available to nurse leaders through Franklin Covey’s All Access Pass. Another crucial turning point for our organization’s culture was Carol’s introduction of Reigniting the Spirit of Caring, a three-day retreat licensed through Creative Health Care Management to engage, rejuvenate, and unite staff from all disciplines and across all entities.

Carol served as a member of numerous hospital committees, is a graduate of AHC’s Executive Fellowship Program (EFP), and has since been invited to present to other EFP cohorts on the topics of emotional intelligence and delivering impactful presentations. In addition to everything mentioned above, Carol always provided unwavering support and availability to her team of nurse educators, each of whom has come to see her as a shining example of what a true leader should be. Carol takes an unobtrusive approach to leading her team, placing the highest level of trust in her direct reports. She provides gentle guidance and seeks out projects and educational opportunities for each individual that will not only challenge them to develop new skills, but also make them shine by utilizing their greatest talents.

Carol respects and takes a personal interest in everyone who crosses her path. She has earned a reputation as a mentor who recognizes the unique talents that each person brings to the table. She takes the time to carefully match a person’s interests and strengths with potential career opportunities and then sets them on the path to achieving their desired outcome. She has met with numerous employees over the years – both clinical and non-clinical – after they approached her for career coaching. Developing people is what she loves doing the most.

One of Carol’s greatest legacies is her incorporation of shared governance into our culture of nursing. Recognizing the significant impact of having engaged nurses, Carol devoted countless hours to ensuring the creation of a nurse practice council on every unit. She sat down with each council to coach them on drafting their charters and sustaining engagement. She now co-leads the strategic initiative team that tracks engagement across the unit-based councils and the hospital-wide council.

On top of all the internal initiatives that she has so successfully spearheaded, Carol has also represented Adventist HealthCare through a number of leadership roles in our community. She serves on the advisory board for Maryland’s Nurse Support Program (NSP), a grant that financially supports nurse retention in hospitals throughout the state. Carol has advocated for our nurses year after year to renew and preserve SGMC’s own NSP funds, and to ensure that they are effectively used to support nursing professional development. Carol has allocated these funds to support expenses related to our nurses becoming certified in their specialties. She has led by example by maintaining her own certification as a CENP. She has also been active as a mentor to nursing students through the Kendall Scholarship program at the Universities at Shady Grove, proving that her support of nurses reaches far beyond the walls of SGMC.

Carol is well-connected with nurse leaders both locally and nationally. As an active member of the American Organization of Nurse Leaders, the Maryland Organization of Nurse Leaders, and the Association for Nursing Professional Development, she stays abreast of trends and projections in the field of nursing. One recent trend that has emerged is the experience/complexity gap. This trend shows that as more experienced nurses retire they are being replaced with an ever-growing number of newer inexperienced nurses, all while the complexity of patient care is increasing. Rather than waiting until we reached crisis mode, Carol proactively led the charge to address how we can close the gap. She played a vital role in the creation of a strategic initiative to better retain, recruit, and develop nurses in the midst of the growing experience/complexity gap.

Everything mentioned here barely scratches the surface of the impact Carol has on her peers, her staff, our hospital, our organization, and the nursing profession as a whole. Carol has been a fixture of our hospital community for over 40 years, bringing strong leadership skills and expert insight to every role she’s held. From bedside nurse to Educator, to Director, to Associate Vice President, Carol has remained humble and grounded through it all. No matter how much work she has on her plate, she will always make time for anyone and never makes it feel like an imposition. She listens with intent to everyone she engages with; she is naturally curious about people and figuring out what drives them; she is an avid proponent of lifelong learning and makes sure she learns something new every day. She has made a name for herself as a trusted leader in our community who lives and breathes excellence in healthcare and builds lasting connections with people.