CHOC Children’s

Candy M. Corral, MBA, MSN, RN, CNS, is a healthcare leader who blends clinical expertise with operational strategy. At CHOC Children’s, she leads surgical services focusing on quality, access and collaboration. Previously at Huntington Health, she expanded key service lines and drove major clinical projects. An advanced practice nurse and Executive MBA graduate, Corral excels where empathy, execution and transformation come together to improve patient care and team performance.

Turning Surgical Complexity into Coherent Systems

Progress in healthcare rarely starts with a policy or a capital plan—it begins when someone notices what isn’t working. For Corral, that recognition came not from reports or dashboards, but from the ground level of clinical care. She has spent her career noticing patterns that don’t connect, processes that strain caregivers and systems that fall short of the needs they were built to serve.

Her approach has never been to add more layers of control. Instead, she focuses on clarity in roles, processes and purpose. Whether in the operating room, across perioperative services or strategy meetings, she brings the same mindset: systems must serve care, not obstruct it.

Where Clinical Thinking Meets Operational Design

Corral’s strength lies in moving between disciplines and carrying insights from bedside practice into service line strategy. Her background as a clinical nurse specialist gives her fluency in the real-time decisions and emotional labor of surgical care. Her training in business and leadership gives her the tools to turn those insights into action.

"As Service Line Director of Surgical Services, Corral leads with clinical depth and operational rigor, bringing together surgeons, nurses and executive leaders around one goal: delivering smarter, safer, more responsive care for kids”

Over the years, she has seen that the best systems are designed by people who understand what care looks and feels like for patients, families and clinical teams. That understanding allows her to redesign perioperative workflows, restructure access models and optimize surgical scheduling with urgency and empathy.

Rather than separating the human from the operational, she builds infrastructure that reflects the rhythm and nuance of pediatric care. The result isn’t just efficiency—it’s resilience.

Aligning Talent, Technology and Trust

As care environments grow more complex, Corral believes the real challenge isn’t adopting new tools—it’s aligning people around shared expectations. Her leadership has consistently focused on rebuilding team trust, clarifying communication across departments and ensuring performance metrics reflect what truly matters.

She has led initiatives that unify clinical priorities with operational delivery, ensuring capital decisions are grounded in outcomes. From strengthening collaboration between surgical teams and anesthesiology to scaling service lines in high-demand settings, she builds systems that remain nimble even under pressure.

Her work isn’t about managing capacity—it’s about creating environments where the proper care happens, at the right time, by teams that feel supported and informed.

Designing for What Comes Next

Looking ahead, Corral sees the future of surgical care shaped not just by innovation, but by integration. As pediatric needs evolve and surgical volumes shift, she believes the most important work is making care models more responsive, able to adapt without delay and scale without compromise.

She continues to bridge the worlds of nursing, strategy and systems thinking—turning insight into improvement and complexity into momentum. Her leadership transforms care delivery from reactive to deliberate, scalable and deeply human.

For Corral, surgical care isn’t just a service line—it’s a system that, when designed well, aligns every moving part for something far greater than it is. A brighter, safer future for the children and families it serves.