Susan K. Burke

Susan K Burke is a healthcare professional who has provided care to patients as a registered nurse in a variety of settings and levels of care for over forty years. She had leadership roles in healthcare organizations in Patient Safety and Quality and Risk Management. She has reviewed thousands of patient safety reports, facilitated more than a hundred RCA and HFMEA teams, and tirelessly followed the Actions and Outcome Measures generated by these teams to determine if root cause gaps were closed. She fully embraces the methodologies for improvement and empathizes with healthcare providers, defending human error with culpability tools, and encouraging support for Second Impact Syndrome.

Currently, she provides comprehensive Life Care Plans for individuals in the legal system who have sustained complex injuries sometimes caused by the healthcare system. She produces a detailed report used by Economists to calculate economic damages. She provides consulting services focused on improvements affecting patient safety. She also provides patient advocacy to people who are seeking a better understanding of their healthcare.

She contributes her experience, knowledge, and training towards helping people find their voice in healthcare to have more situational awareness of their rights and recognize potential pitfalls that may present on their healthcare journey. She has certifications, awards, and achievements, but she has provided her time to organizational healthcare improvement and is unimpressed with the progress they have made over the years.

Susan is of a certain age and as she has the privilege of aging, she will be more likely to be a patient. For those who have treated her as a patient know, she will ask the hard questions and have difficult conversations not allowing the status quo to receive a higher level of care than her. She saved her own life with this attitude and wants to teach people and their advocates too.