AVP Perioperative Services
Inova Health System
Arlington, Virginia, United States
Portia Steele is a transformational nurse leader with over 17 years of nursing experience. She has served as an Advanced Practice Registered Nurse (APRN) since 2015, functioning as a Registered Nurse First Assistant (RNFA)—a role in which she first fell in love with the operating room and its complex, high-performing team environment.
She currently serves as Assistant Vice President of Perioperative Nursing at Inova Fairfax Medical Campus, where she leads strategic and operational oversight for more than 70 operating and procedural rooms across seven surgical departments. Portia is a champion of nurse-physician dyad leadership, multidisciplinary collaboration, and frontline engagement to drive high-reliability outcomes.
Under her leadership, the organization has achieved measurable improvements in surgical safety—outperforming national benchmarks in Retained Surgical Items (RSIs), wrong-site surgeries, and surgical burns—while also enhancing operational efficiency. Her work centers on fostering collaboration across teams to support effective HEAL Sessions, strengthen microculture recognition, and reinforce behavioral expectations through value-based coaching and robust feedback systems.
Portia is deeply committed to creating healthy, happy work environments where perioperative teams feel supported, valued, and empowered to perform at their best. Her leadership philosophy centers on psychological safety, shared purpose, and values-driven practice—building a sustainable culture of excellence in surgical care.
Disclosure(s): No financial relationships to disclose
3019 - The Future of Surgical Safety: Unleashing the Potential of Dyad Leadership
Sunday, April 12, 2026
10:30 AM - 11:15 AM CST