Nicole Collier
Healthcare Quality Leader, Patient Safety, Regulatory Compliance
Healthcare Quality Professional specializing in Patient Safety, Regulatory Compliance, and Sterile Processing Systems. Doctoral candidate in Healthcare Administration. Founder of Back to Basics
About
Nicole Collier is a healthcare quality leader focused on patient safety, regulatory compliance, and building systems that protect patients before harm ever occurs. Her philosophy is simple: real risk management lives upstream, in standards, training, and daily discipline, long before after-harm metrics ever appear.Her career spans sixteen years in healthcare, from hands-on sterile processing technician to supervisor to system-level quality work. That frontline foundation shapes how she leads: she has run the instruments, built the workflows, audited the outcomes, and knows exactly where quality breaks down. Today she works at the intersection of patient safety, regulatory compliance, and sterile processing systems, assessing risk, strengthening standards, and turning everyday saves into real quality data.She holds an MHA, earned summa cum laude with a 4.0 GPA, a standard she set for herself in her schoolwork and now brings to every department and every system she touches. She is a Doctor of Health Administration candidate, expected in December 2029. Her certifications include CRCST, CIS, CER, and CHL, spanning sterile processing, instrument specialization, endoscope reprocessing, and healthcare leadership.Through Back to Basics, she writes to hold a mirror up to healthcare leaders and frontline workers, challenging them to ask whether the fundamentals are truly in place. If your organization is serious about patient safety, quality, and compliance, let's talk.
Contact her through the contact options below.
Back to Basics Educator Development
Nicole Collier, CRCST, CIS, CER, CHL, founder of Back to Basics.
What SPD educator development is
Sterile processing runs on people. Yet education in SPD often means a slide deck and a sign-off sheet. That is not development. Development means technicians who understand why a standard exists, not just that it exists. It means educators who can read data, write policy, and fix a broken process, not just deliver an in-service.
The Back to Basics approach
Master the fundamentals before complexity. That is the whole idea. The fundamentals here are specific: standards, data, policies, KPIs, implementation, system problem-solving. Skip one and everything after it wobbles.The program is grounded in the standards the field actually answers to: ANSI/AAMI ST79, AORN, and HSPA.It is not a generic corporate template dropped into a department. It is built for SPD, by someone who came up through it: tech, then supervisor, then system-level quality.
Three pillars
Every part of the program serves one of three purposes:- Help people grow
- Keep people safe
- Keep people knowledgeable
If a lesson, assessment, or competency doesn't map to one of these three, it doesn't belong in the program.
Outcomes
- Technicians who can explain the why behind the standard
- Educators who can build and defend a training plan
- Data you can take to a surveyor or a surgeon
- A department that lives the standard, so inspections stop being an event
Credentials
CRCST, CIS, CER, CHL
MHA, summa cum laude, 4.0 GPA
DHA candidate, expected December 2029
Sixteen years in healthcare: tech to supervisor to system-level quality
Founder of Back to Basics
Where to go next
Read more on standards, data, and practice on the blog, Nicole Collier Back to Basics. The short version lives at nicolecollier.com. The conversation continues on LinkedIn.If this fits your department, consider a conversation. No pitch. Just the fundamentals.
