About the consultant

Mariana Costea is a Care Governance & Operational Improvement Specialist with 17+ years of experience across health and social care, from frontline care and registered nursing through service management, regional clinical leadership and independent consultancy.
As Founder and Director of Mareric Limited, Mariana works with care organisations to understand what is really happening within their services, identify where practice, governance and operational reality have started to drift apart, and turn those findings into practical, sustainable improvement.
Her work includes independent governance and operational reviews, CQC readiness and regulatory assurance, service diagnostics and turnaround support, quality assurance and improvement planning, leadership support, and independent validation of improvement.
Mariana's approach goes beyond checking whether policies, audits and governance systems exist. She examines whether they work in practice, whether records accurately reflect the care being delivered, whether leaders have genuine visibility of risk, and whether actions taken result in sustained improvement.
Having worked from frontline care through to senior leadership and consultancy, Mariana brings a practical understanding of how governance decisions translate into the everyday experience of people receiving care and the staff supporting them.
She is a Registered Nurse, C-CAF Accredited Consultant and author of Stopping the Drift, which explores how small gaps in leadership, governance and everyday practice can become normalised over time and develop into wider organisational failure.