Ursula Nawab, M.D., Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital Vice President, Patient Safety and Quality

Dr. Nawab is the vice president of patient safety and quality and specializes in neonatology at Johns Hopkins All Children’s. She joined the hospital staff in 2023.

At Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), Dr. Nawab was senior medical director of patient safety. She also maintained clinical responsibilities as an attending neonatologist in the Newborn/Infant Intensive Care Unit where she served as an associate medical director for quality and safety and as the division patient safety officer for neonatology. Academically, she was a professor of clinical pediatrics in the division of neonatology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Before her time at CHOP, she was the clinical medical director for neonatology and associate professor of pediatrics, neonatal-perinatal medicine at Thomas Jefferson University/Nemours in Philadelphia. Before these roles, she was an assistant professor of pediatrics in neonatal-perinatal medicine at the University of Texas Medical School in Houston.

At the national and international level, Dr. Nawab is an invited presenter at numerous conferences focused on advances in patient safety culture, neonatology, systems thinking and quality improvement. She serves as a diagnostic safety and quality resource subject matter expert for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and as a committee member with the Coalition to Improve Diagnosis. She completed the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s Patient Safety Executive Development program and was a site quality improvement lead for the National Emergency Airway Registry for Neonates. She has served as reviewer for journals on topics in human factors engineering, patient safety and quality improvement. She was also a steering committee member of a Patient-centered Outcomes Research Institute International Quality Improvement Consortium regarding Hand Hygiene and Preventing Infections in the NICU.

Dr. Nawab earned her medical degree from the University of South Florida College of Medicine. She completed her pediatric residency at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital/duPont Children’s Hospital and a fellowship in neonatal-perinatal medicine at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital/Christiana Care Hospital. She is currently completing a master’s degree in human factors engineering at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University.