Sarah Pierce, CRNA, earned her Bachelor of Science in Nursing from Washington State University in 1999. She began her career at Kootenai Health in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, where she served as a critical care nurse in both the cardiac and medical intensive care units from 2001 to 2010. During this time, she also worked as a Kootenai County EMS Critical Care Transporter and as a Hospital Supervisor at Kootenai Health, gaining extensive experience in high-acuity patient care and leadership.

Driven to advance her clinical practice, Sarah completed her Master of Anesthesia Education at Gonzaga University in 2012. She is now a Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist (CRNA) and a partner with Anesthesia Associates of Coeur d’Alene (AACDA), a private, collaborative practice of CRNAs and anesthesiologists who share equal partnership and practice independently.

In addition to her clinical work, Sarah has held key leadership roles within the organization and the broader healthcare community. She has served on the Anesthesia Joint Operating Committee at Kootenai Health for eight years and was Chair of the AACDA Board of Directors in 2020. For the past nine years, she has been a member of the Kootenai Health Foundation Board of Directors and will begin her term as Vice-Chair in January 2026. Sarah also established the Pierce Family Scholarship, supporting Kootenai Health employees pursuing further education, as well as a dedicated Difficult Airway Response Team (DART) Fund.

Sarah is the current Medical Director of the Difficult Airway Response Team Program at Kootenai Health. Her work in airway safety has led to publications with the Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation (APSF) and, most recently, a co-authored article in Emergency Medicine Practice titled “Difficult Airway Management in Trauma: A Review of Current Guidelines.” She also presented research at the World Airway Management Meeting in Florence, Italy, with an abstract titled “Scaling Safety: Adapting the DART Program for Regional and Rural Hospitals of Idaho.”

A committed educator, Sarah has lectured frequently for Northwest States Anesthesia on topics including Enhanced Recovery Pathways, complex case presentations, mass transfusion protocols, physiology, and difficult airway response systems. She has also taught Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS) and Pediatric Advanced Life Support (PALS) for over a decade.