Healthcare Physical Environment consulting — built from decades inside the room, not just around it.
Meet Laura Speary
HarborLight Safety LLC was founded by Laura Speary, a credentialed Healthcare EHS and Life Safety professional with more than 18 years of dedicated EHS and Life Safety leadership experience and more than 26 years working in healthcare environments overall.
Laura's career was built within a multi-facility North Carolina health system spanning three counties — an 855-bed, multi-facility North Carolina health system — a main medical center with integrated women's and children's, behavioral health, and rehabilitation hospitals, a specialty orthopedic and surgical hospital, community and critical access hospitals, two ambulatory surgery centers, a free-standing emergency department, two endoscopy centers, and more than 30 off-site clinics. She served as Hospital Safety Officer for 17 years and later took on a Regional Manager, Environmental Health & Safety role, carrying both sets of responsibilities concurrently while overseeing Physical Environment compliance across the full system.
Over the course of her career, Laura built, managed, and evaluated Physical Environment management plans for Safety, Life Safety, Hazardous Materials & Waste, and Emergency Management, and reviewed and advised on Security, Utilities, and Medical Equipment. In her regional role, she revised Physical Environment plans across the region and served as a designated regional reviewer on corporate, system-wide plans.
She wrote the Annual Program Evaluations for Safety, Life Safety, and Hazardous Materials & Waste, contributed the performance indicator and open-findings analysis for the remaining four program areas, and reviewed and compiled all seven into a single consistent evaluation for Physical Environment Committee approval each year.
She has provided direct EHS and Life Safety oversight across numerous construction projects, renovations, and facility upgrades throughout her 18+ year career — most recently providing Life Safety oversight within the project meetings for two ground-up facility builds and bringing both through completed pre-opening mock surveys. She also led the review, revision, and integration of more than three dozen Environment of Care and Physical Environment policies when her health system was acquired by a larger corporate health system — aligning facility-level practice with new corporate standards without disrupting day-to-day compliance.
She has been in the room for both DNV and TJC surveys — escorting surveyors, reviewing documentation, and participating in Life Safety, Hazardous Materials, Emergency Management, and Security sessions — from inside the same organization as it transitioned between both accreditation bodies.
Why HarborLight Safety
What those decades taught Laura is simple: healthcare safety and compliance do not happen in separate departments. The hardest problems live where responsibilities overlap — findings that stall between teams, corrective actions that lose their owner, documentation that no longer matches the building. Laura founded HarborLight Safety to bring that same hands-on, systems-level expertise to healthcare organizations that don't have a dedicated EHS or Life Safety resource of their own — without the cost, delay, or commitment of a full-time hire. Every engagement is built on the same standard she held herself to at regional scale: findings identified before they become surveyor findings, documentation that reflects a living program, and guidance a facility can actually put into practice.
DNV CHOP | EP-MESH | ASC
Who I Serve
✔ Critical Access Hospitals
✔ Community & Regional Hospitals
✔ Surgical & Specialty Centers
✔ Behavioral Health Facilities
✔ Physician / Clinic-Based Practices