DBT40 Honoree: LeAnn Myers

Position: Director of Quality Improvemen

Employer: Westside Family Healthcare

Age: 34

LeAnn Myers has wanted to help reduce human suffering ever since her aunt Tammy sustained a traumatic brain injury from a car accident during Myers’ senior year of high school. Myers and her family dealt with the painful loss of her aunt, but Myers found some comfort in knowing that the health care providers who cared for her aunt lessened her suffering.

As the director of quality improvement at Westside Family Healthcare, Myers helps optimize the quality of care for patients. About seven months into that role, Myers also became the infection prevention nurse for the organization. Little did she know that her new responsibility would play such a critical role in the coronavirus pandemic that struck one month later.

Myers helped develop and implement infection prevention processes to keep patients and staff safe and reduce confusion with recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization that would change almost daily. She also managed procedures for responding to an employee’s exposure and developed processes for returning to work.

Before coming to Westside, Myers served as the director of clinical operations at Nemours, where she developed the ambulatory leadership team and ambulatory shared governance council. Myers worked on a project that focused on how to manage an aggressive child in the ambulatory setting, presented her work at a national conference, and published that work.

Myers participates in Nemours’ annual Heart Walk to raise money for heart disease. She also helped organize the ambulatory contributions for the Rise Against Hunger campaign at Nemours in 2018 to gather food for food insecure families.

Each fall, Myers speaks to the University of Delaware’s graduating nurses about leadership and interview techniques.

Myers and her husband, Norris, have been married for 11 years and the couple have two children, Aiden and Reagan. They enjoy doing outdoor activities together, such as taking out their boat to catch crabs and fish, harvesting vegetables from their garden, and raising baby chicks.