Our Executive Team

Healthcare and Educational professionals have united in their mission to ensure all vendor employees working in Healthcare facilities receive competency training on the unique challenges and requirements of this environment.

Jack Rutledge
President
National Healthcare ED

Jack founded National Healthcare ED for the purpose of providing quality, online competency training programs for the employees of the vendors/contractors working in healthcare facilities. These employees need to understand the many unique aspects they will encounter in healthcare settings, and how the actions of non-trained workers can negatively impact patients and the caregivers working hard to help their patients recover from an illness or injury. Patients need, and deserve, a high-quality healing environment. That series of training programs has now expanded to provide continuous education for healthcare facilities own inhouse physical environment workers.

Jack’s past experiences include being the founder and President of Rutledge Environmental, a successful company he sold after spending 24 years providing environment remediation services for healthcare facilities in several states, East of the Mississippi River. During that same timeframe, he spent 15 years managing the conferences, training programs, and the administrative responsibilities of the Kentucky Society of Healthcare Engineers. It was during the combined management of Rutledge Environmental and KSHE that he saw the glaring lack of competency training for healthcare contractor employees. In response to those observations, he and his longtime friend, Gary Slack, set about developing a series of educational courses for contractor employees, and non-clinical healthcare staff.

Jack and Gary then assembled a Team of Experts to help deliver those live offerings. That was the springboard for the National Healthcare ED series of training courses for all healthcare physical environment workers, be they inhouse staff or outsourced contractor employees.

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Gary Slack
Co-Developer and Chief Healthcare Standards Advisor
National Healthcare ED

During the early years of National Healthcare ED, Gary was also the President and Founder of Healthcare Engineering Consultants. As such, he spent over 35 years teaching, doing research, and consulting in clinical engineering and regulatory management for healthcare facilities from Alaska to South Florida, and a great many States in between. He has been a sought-after speaker for healthcare conferences across the United States, has published many articles about healthcare regulatory management, and has written, or been a contributor to, five books that focus on healthcare physical environment related topics. Since retiring from his previous consulting company, he has announced that he no longer does speaking engagements.

In addition, Gary has served on several national technical committees, including the National Fire Protection Association [NFPA], OPUS Communications, and the Healthcare Safety Institute. WHEN THE JOINT COMMISSION ADDED A LIFE SAFETY SURVEYOR TO THEIR SURVEY TEAMS, THEY CONTRACTED WITH GARY TO TRAIN THE FIRST ROUND OF THOSE SURVEYORS.

Today, after retiring from Healthcare Engineering Consultants, Gary devotes his working time to ensuring the accuracy of the technical aspects of National Healthcare ED’s training programs.

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