JENNIFER ROMAN

Luminis Health Doctors Community Medical Center

Jennifer Roman has spent more than a decade advancing patient care at Luminis Health Doctors Community Medical Center, where she serves as nurse clinical supervisor on the Progressive Care Unit. Over the past two years, Roman has worked to strengthen nursing quality, safety and engagement on the unit, guided by a belief that the best outcomes come from involving frontline staff in solutions and clearing the barriers that stand in their way.

To that end, Roman established the unit’s first Nursing Shared-Governance Quality Council, bringing nurses and patient care technicians from the progressive care unit and the telemetry unit together each month to examine cases of hospital-acquired pressure injuries, falls and infections and to develop prevention strategies. She also built and maintains a real-time quality dashboard tracking national nursing metrics, patient experience scores and unit goals such as increasing patient mobility. As a leader within a high-reliability organization, she champions a just culture, reasoning that errors usually stem from system failures and that staff must feel safe to raise concerns. Part of each council meeting is devoted to sharing near misses and discussing how to prevent them.

Roman points to her interdisciplinary work with the respiratory department as a particular source of pride. After identifying inconsistencies in how emergency supplies were kept for patients with chronic tracheostomies, she designed a reusable emergency kit, introduced bedside signage and helped create a learning module to teach nurses how to resuscitate patients with laryngectomies. Her other initiatives include Wound Care Wednesdays, a weekly skin-check effort for high-risk patients, and a redesigned reminder system that significantly improved intake and output documentation.

Roman is also committed to developing her staff, encouraging bedside nurses to join the Clinical Ladder program and take ownership of quality work. She holds a bachelor’s degree in nursing from the University of Maryland, Baltimore and an associate degree in nursing from Anne Arundel Community College, and she has maintained her progressive care nursing certification through the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses for more than 10 years.

Roman is pursuing a master’s degree through Walden University with the goal of becoming a family nurse practitioner by the end of 2026. Outside of work, she counts raising her two children, Owen and Eliza, as her greatest accomplishment.