Marisa White, RN, BSN is the Infection Preventionist and also Director of Learning at Broad Reach, comes from a family of health care professionals; her dad was a paramedic for many years in her hometown Wellfleet, and her mom was a Certified Nursing Assistant who worked at Broad Reach before Marisa got started in 2017.

“I wanted to become a nurse because of them,” she says. After Nauset High School and Cape Cod Community College, she graduated from UMass Boston with her degree and joined Broad Reach, first on the Oyster Pond nursing unit, working with cognitively impaired residents on the evening shift. When the unit manager retired, she moved into that position, and then was promoted to her current role in 2022. Much but not all of her time now is spent at Liberty Commons; her commute is from Hyannis where she lives with her young son and fiancé.

Working to prevent infection involves focus both on medication and best practices:

“Of course I’m always looking at antibiotics, patient by patient, what they are being prescribed for, and do we need to continue or change that? Then there’s emphasis on regular practices like gloves and gowns, hand washing. That ties into COVID as well as the flu season. Since COVID, the general practice of wearing masks has definitely helped.”

With the Director of Learning hat on, Marisa works on staff education and yearly competency reviews, again with the mindset that proactive approaches prevent problems and that’s by far the preference.

“So there are specifics, and then bigger picture issues,” she says. “That’s the mix of my work.”