Byron Kitagawa, BS, HEM, CLSS-HC

Byron Kitagawa has more than 30 years of safety and healthcare experience within the life safety and physical environment sectors including employee safety, security, communications, environmental services, laundry/linen, and emergency management. Byron is currently employed at a California based HMO hospital system serving as a specialist in the department of accreditation, regulatory and licensing.

Byron served as a Life Safety Code Surveyor for the Joint Commission for eleven years. His scope of service and experience includes surveying over six-hundred hospitals and facilities, critical access hospitals, long-term care facilities and ambulatory surgery centers. The hospitals were classified non-profit, private, VA, and publicly funded state and local government systems. Additionally, he has surveyed domestic and international military hospitals. 

In his early career, Bryon served as Senior Safety Management Specialist at Sharp Healthcare, and he served as Hospital Risk and Safety Officer at Natividad Medical Center. In both positions he specialized in compliance, safety and prevention as regulations and policies applied to complex environment of care issues and performance improvement.

Byron completed his Bachelor’s Degree at the University of Hawaii where he entered his career in safety management and completed his current certifications in Life Safety and Healthcare Environment Management. He is a certified Healthcare Environmental Manager (HEM) with ECRI and a Certified Life Safety Specialist for Healthcare (CLSS-HC) with NFPA, and he specializes in the physical environment for psychiatric hospitals. He was a contributor to the second edition of the “Design Guide for the Built Environment of Behavioral Health Facilities” published in 2007.